A SS&C Blue Prism Lexicon

[majroud]

In my experience, I’ve seen many new developers struggle to explain Blue Prism concepts to business teams or managers simply because they don’t know how to break it down in plain terms. So, I have put together a simplified lexicon to clarify the core ideas of Blue Prism. It's not a list of every term used, but it is the terms you'll hear a lot when starting out as an RPA Developer.

I hope this will be useful for all of us, not just to grasp the concepts ourselves, but also so you can communicate them more effectively. Let’s begin. (I hope you’re not hungry!)

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RPA (Robotic Process Automation)
Technology that enables the creation and orchestration of “robots” capable of mimicking a human on a computer. It can, for example, click, copy‑paste, fill out forms, read emails or send them, and much more. It is not a physical robot, but a program.

Blue Prism
RPA tool that allows you to create, deploy, and manage software robots.

Process
Using technology for the robot to carry out a task. Think of it as a cooking recipe. To make a chocolate cake you need to:

• Preheat the oven to required temperature
• Mix eggs and sugar
• Add the flour
• Pour into a cake tin
• Put it in the oven for x minutes

In a Blue Prism process, we describe the steps in order to meet a business need without getting into technical details. For example:

• Retrieve a file
• Perform a series of checks on it
• Create a reporting file
• Send the file to the business

Moreover, when a developer says: “I made an evolution on the process.” It means the recipe has changed. For instance, the original recipe called for 200 g of chocolate, but we found it works better with only 100 g. So we modify a step in the process to adapt.

Page
A page is how you organise the steps inside a process or object — think of it as a chapter in your recipe book. Rather than writing one enormously long recipe, you break it into chapters: Preparation, Baking, Decoration.

Pages keep things readable and manageable. When a developer says "that logic lives on the validation page," they mean it's in a specific, clearly labelled chapter of the automation.

Stage
A stage is a single step inside a process or object — the smallest unit of work. Think of it like one line in a recipe: "crack the eggs," "whisk the mixture," "pour into the tin." Each line does one thing. Chain enough stages together and you have a full recipe.

When a developer says "the robot is failing on that stage," they mean it's stumbling on one specific line of the recipe.

Action
The most common stage you'll encounter. An action is how the process calls upon an object to do something technical — it's the moment the recipe says "use the oven." The process doesn't explain how the oven works; it simply calls on it to do its job.

Decision
A decision stage is a fork in the road. Based on a condition — true or false, yes or no — the robot takes one path or another. In recipe terms: "Is the cake golden brown? If yes, take it out. If no, leave it in for five more minutes."

Without decisions, the robot would blindly follow one path regardless of what it finds. Decisions make the robot smart enough to react.

Loop
A loop tells the robot to repeat a set of steps until a condition is met. Imagine you have a tray of 12 cupcakes to ice — you don't write out 12 separate instructions; you write one instruction and repeat it 12 times.

In Blue Prism, loops are used constantly, particularly when working through a Work Queue or a Collection.

Object
This is where we teach the robot to interact with applications. If the process is cooking a recipe, objects are the utensils and appliances. In a recipe you don’t explain how the oven is built; you simply say: “Set the oven to 180 °C.”

The inner workings of the oven are hidden. This is exactly the same with Blue Prism objects.

In Object Studio you’ll find how the robot uses an application, how it clicks, and how it reads information on the screen. Its purpose is to answer the question: “How do we do it technically?”

Developers create these objects in a separate Blue Prism section called a Business Object: “I need to modify the SAP object.”

This means the oven has changed. More concretely, perhaps a button moved, a field was renamed, or the screen looks different. You adjust the utensils (objects) while the recipe (process) stays the same.

Control Room
The Control Room is the manager that oversees everything. It can tell the chef to start cooking, see how many dishes are in progress, check to see if something is burning, and schedule the evening service. It doesn’t cook; it monitors and organizes. In the Control Room you can, for example, start a robot, stop a robot, check if it has crashed, and schedule its work.

Digital Worker
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noticed how hungry I am while writing this article. Unfortunately, I’m not a great chef. Speaking of chefs, meet the Digital Worker—the cook who follows the recipe without complaint.

It makes no decisions, creates nothing, and does not think; it simply follows the instructions given to it.

If the recipe is bad, it will produce a bad dish.

If the recipe is good, it will always produce the same perfect dish.

In practice, a Digital Worker is a robot that is currently running. When you hear the phrase “We have 15 Digital Workers.” This means 15 robots are running in parallel.

Runtime Resource
This is the computer—usually a virtual machine—on which the robot runs. To keep our kitchen analogy, it’s the kitchen where the chef works. If the kitchen is closed, the chef can’t work. When the kitchen is open, the chef can work.

Several chefs can be in the same kitchen, but they can’t do the exact same task simultaneously, so the kitchen must match each chef’s needs.

This part is more complex, so I’ll stop here to avoid confusion.

Scheduler
Simply put, it’s the schedule. If a robot must run every day at 6 a.m., the Scheduler provides a detailed plan for robot execution. “Detailed” means you can specify days, times, and even adjust for constraints like holidays. This means that the robot runs automatically at the right moment without human intervention.

Work Queue
When a developer talks about a “queue,” they mean the robot’s work stack. In our kitchen, think of it as a stack of orders—the queue.

The chef (our digital worker) takes an order, prepares the dish, then moves to the next order. If he has to make six chocolate mousses (I love chocolate), he will produce them one by one until none are left.

Collection
A collection is a table of data — rows and columns — that the robot can read, write, and work through. If a Data Item is a single ingredient (one egg), a collection is the full shopping list (eggs, flour, sugar, butter...).

You'll hear this term in almost every project. When a developer says "I'm looping through the collection," they mean the robot is going through that list row by row, handling each item in turn.

Input File
These are the one or more files needed to work efficiently. They can be supplied by the business or extracted automatically by a robot. They provide the “ingredients” required for the job.

Example: the business may provide the invoices that need to be processed - these are the input files.

Data Item
A data item stores information during the execution of a process. Its value can change over time. In programming terms, a data item is essentially a variable.

Exception
Various problems can arise during a robot’s execution. We usually split exceptions into two main categories: 

• Business Exception: the error originates from the business side (e.g., missing data in the input file).
• System Exception: a technical issue (e.g., a website fails to open, preventing the robot from continuing).

Best practice: log the problem clearly, determine in advance whether it blocks execution entirely or can be worked around, and notify the business or developers to resolve it as quickly as possible.

Credential Manager
A secure vault that holds all keys and passwords. When a robot needs to interact with a site, you don’t want passwords lying around, so you store them centrally in a protected location that manages them for you.

Logging
Logging is the robot leaving a trail of breadcrumbs as it works. At key moments during execution, the robot writes a note — what it did, what it found, whether something went wrong.

When something breaks at 3 a.m. and nobody was watching, the log is how you piece together exactly what happened. Good logging is the difference between a five-minute fix and a two-hour investigation.

A good developer logs generously and clearly — future you will be very grateful.

Environment
An environment is a separate, controlled version of the world the robot operates in. There are typically three:

• Development – where the robot is built and tinkered with
• Test/UAT – where it's checked before going live
• Production – the real world, where it runs for real

Think of it as test kitchens versus the actual restaurant. You experiment and make mistakes in the test kitchen so nothing goes wrong when real customers are eating.

Environment Variable
Stores global parameters such as folder paths, URLs, or any central information that does not change frequently.

Purpose (as the name suggests): adapt these values from one environment to another.

Example: during development you might use a dummy site provided by the business to avoid real‑world impact. When testing a robot that would send multi‑million transfers, you point it to the fake site in the test environment and to the real site in production.

Release Manager
Once a robot has been built and tested, it needs to be moved from one environment to another. The Release Manager is the tool that handles this — packaging up your work and shipping it safely across environments.

In kitchen terms, it's the process of moving a tried-and-tested recipe from the test kitchen into the main restaurant. You wouldn't scribble changes directly onto the live menu — you test first, then release.

Session
A session is like a service shift in a kitchen. Each time a robot starts, it creates a session. Blue Prism provides session variables that can be changed manually by a human while the robot is still running.

Simple use case: set a time at which the robot should stop.

If a session variable is used, the developer must design the robot’s behavior in advance to handle possible modifications.

Input Parameter
Unlike a session variable, an input parameter is defined just before the robot runs (i.e., before a session starts).

Example use: specify a particular name for each test run.