DX Hours

Valuation of Digital Exchange Downloads

Introduction

The Blue Prism Digital Exchange (DX) is the marketplace for the Blue Prism customers. It is a two-sided marketplace where employees, partners, and customers can contribute Assets while employees, partners, and customers can download Assets. When you provide an Asset to the DX, we call you a contributor; when you download an Asset from the DX, we call you an Automator.

The value of the DX to an Automator is the time that they save by downloading an Asset from the DX rather than building it themselves. When they download from the DX, the value proposition is that they can create Intelligent Automations faster, better, and cheaper. Our overall message to the Blue Prism Automator is that they should “DX before they DIY.”

Recently, I’ve asked challenged myself, “How do we make the value of an Asset download more tactile?”

Any given downloadable Asset on the DX is either a Blue Prism Process, Function, Connector, or AI Skill. All four download types start life as an upload onto the DX in a special XML file format called a .bprelease file. The file will either remain a .bprelease file or get transformed into a .bpskill file. But for our purposes, we will talk about them as .bprealeases.

• A Process is a .bprelease imported into Blue Prism Process Studio. It might contain other objects such as VBOs, Code Stages, Web APIs, or SOAP APIs. A Process is a business process and thus is closer to a solution.

• A Function is a .bprelease imported into Blue Prism Object Studio to perform a local transformation upon Blue Prism data. For example, the Regular Expression function is used to match and make substitutions on text variables.

• A Connector is a .bprelease imported into the Blue Prism Object Studio or Skill menu. It is the ability to connect over the network to an external application using either a User Interface or an API to allow the Digital Worker to perform transactions in the associated app. For example, the Salesforce connector enables the Digital to Worker to create, read, update, or delete any of the logical data objects within Salesforce.

• An AI Skill is a .bprelease imported into the Blue Prism Object Studio or Skill menu. It is the ability to connect over the network to external Artificial Intelligence using an API to give the Digital Worker capabilities approaching that of a human. For example, there are several OCR AI Skills that allow Digital Workers to read printed documents.

There is nothing special about the downloadable Assets. Anyone can take the time and build any Asset in the Blue Prism studios. But that is the rub, the DX allows you to download it quickly and you’re off and running without a lot of fuss. Thus, the message of “DX before you DIY.” Yes, you can do it yourself, but why bother if you can just download it from the DX.

Determining Value of an Asset

When a user comes to the DX, we want to ensure that they see the value of the DX with every Asset that they look at and eventually download. The question becomes, “How do we display the value of an Asset?”

Each downloadable Asset starts as a .bprelease file uploaded to the DX. When the Asset upload is submitted, a Digital Worker named Deming processes the Asset for Quality Assessment. Deming looks at the Marketing, Legal, and Technical attributes of the Asset to ensure that they meet our standards. The Technical characteristics include the parsing of the XML in the .bprelease file to ensure that the contents are accurately described and safe for download.

When Deming runs, we are proposing that Deming analyzes the contents of the .bprelease file and ascertain the complexity of the processes, objects, code stages, web APIs, and SOAP APIs that it contains. Using this complexity, Deming estimates the Level of Effort (LoE) that it would take for a Blue Prism customer to develop the Asset from scratch. Deming stores the Level of Effort (in person-hours) in the DX database entry associated with the Asset.

The display of each Asset Page that contains a download includes the Level of Effort to create the Asset from scratch. Thus, the Automator gets a straightforward and tactile message about how long it would take to DIY versus performing the download. After the Automator performs the download, a message should come up that says, “Congratulations, your download just saved X hours of work!”

For each user, we display for them the total number of hours they have saved by downloading Assets from the DX.

For each company with a DX Private account, we provide the Company Account Owner with a display of the total number of hours saved by the entire company by downloading assets. Finally, the DX Admin, can generate a custom report on any company or user on hours saved.