Utilisation of robots and better scheduler timetable view

[AnastasiyaIlgov]

Dear Blue Prism developers,
I am working with Blue Prism since 2015 and literally each of our customers is asking about the same thing which is still not implemented in Blue Prism. It is some kind of view where you can see how robots are occupied with current processes in production. There is recent activity view and Timetable currently in Blue Prism but they do not show you name of the resource PC and it is a very crucial bit of information when planning robots in reality having some processes live in place. Please provide this functionality as soon as you can please!

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Anastasiya,

The internal review team has discussed your idea, and we have determined we Need More Info in order to appropriately route your idea along the lifecycle.

Can you please clarify if this is about the timetable in the scheduler or if it's about the processes that are running/already have run?

Thank you,
Melanie

[AnastasiyaIlgov]

Hi Melanie,
I am glad that I have got a feedback from you. I will try to explain. Well my idea is easy - neither in Reports or Timetables views (Under Scheduler in Control Room) we can see the overview of all available robots and their current utilization. Task is easy - new live process is coming and and lets say needs to run within 10 and 14 am then we need to decide on which robot we have this timeslot between 10 and 14 AM to run this process. This is very tricky task in the current Blue Prism environment.

So, first it will be good to have a view from the robot machine perspective. Some view where it will be clear which robot has which empty timeslots during the day, during the whole week etc. Having such kind of view will be easy for me to decide QUICKLY on which robot should we put our new process live.

Another problem is to have a view/graph/statistics about utilization of robots so that we know that 10 robots (10 licences we are currently paying are occupied for 50 percent). Some kind of view/graph/statistics from which I can get an idea that may be 5 licenses will be enough for me instead of 10. It would be good to know how much time a day each robot is working according to schedules planned VS how much time a day IN REALITY robot is doing his job. Sometimes it might happen that schedule is planned to just start at 9 AM without any stop time for the process. But in reality this process takes about 8-10 hours to process the whole queue every day. It would be good to know some kind of statistics (can be parametrized by 1 month from the past, 1 year from the past etc.) how occupied this or that robot is based on data from robot's execution from the past.

I think that these 2 things would be very helpful for anybody working with Blue Prism! If you need more information do not hesitate to contact me.

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Anastasiya,

Thank you for the additional info! In light of the new information you provided in the comment below, the team has decided to route this idea forward to the Under Consideration status. From here, the idea will continue forward through our internal review process to determine feasibility for inclusion in the product.   

We will update you as your idea moves along the lifecycle.

Thank you!
Melanie 

[BartWille1]

ACTUAL VDI USAGE: Use the already available session data to create buckets of 5 min (or another bucket size) to set true/false whether a VDI was in use and show this in a chart. X-axis: time; Y-axis: number of VDIs in use. This gives a view on the % of actual in use VDIs.

When you google "occupancy rate calculation" you'll find multiple examples.

This actual usage can then be compared with the planned usage. However, there is no clear visual of the planned usage either. 

PLANNED VDI USAGE: The control room has timetables with a visual representation of the planned runs. However, this doesn't give a clear view on when we are planning to use how many VDIs. The Schedule and Task tables contain all the necessary information on when BP processes will start and on which VDI. 

The tricky part is that Blue Prism doesn't know how long the process is expected to run. For this I propose a new table with project information: manual handling time per case, expected number of cases per year, expected avg run time,... The latter, in combination with the already available data, can be used to estimate the VDI usage.

The new table shouldn't be on BP Process level, but on the same level as the Schedules are organized. I.e. a project containing multiple BP processes (e.g. login, load queue, process, reporting, logout).