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How Blueprint Supports RPA Platform Migrations

4 min read
Nov 30, 2021 9:30:00 AM

We’ve written a lot about RPA platform migrations and how the desire to switch RPA tools is increasing among automation programs.

The focus has been on what’s driving the motivation to switch or onboard new RPA vendors, with a big emphasis on what the challenges and costs are for migration models. In all those pieces, we’ve alluded to how Blueprint dramatically accelerates migrations and reduces the costs of switching, but we’ve never really gotten into the technical details of how we do it.

In this article, that’s exactly what we’re going to do: give you a peek under the hood and explain how we approach and support RPA platform migrations to radically reduce the time and resources it takes to make a switch.

The majority of RPA platform migrations occur between the four largest RPA vendors: UiPath, Microsoft Power Automate, Blue Prism, and Automation Anywhere. To support switches across those four platforms, a platform-agnostic solution was needed. That’s where Blueprint RPA Migration Assistant’s journey started.

To develop an agnostic migration platform that worked with the four major RPA vendors (and more in the future), Blueprint created a proprietary mapping engine called COM (Common Object Model). This is the underlying technology behind Blueprint’s RPA Migration Assistant.

Blueprint’s Common Object Model (COM)

Blueprint’s COM ingests data from different RPA platforms and deconstructs the automation elements from these major RPA platforms into generic representations, enabling conversion into other RPA formats.

For simplicity, Blueprint’s Common Object Model can be broken down into three essential functions:

  1. Ingestion

Bots are first imported into Blueprint using an import utility. COM deconstructs the source RPA language/script by understanding the different RPA activities and mapping them into a generic Common Object Model.

Each Bot step is represented as a process step within Blueprint. The bot activity function is deconstructed using the COM model and mapped directly to the process step using a parameter editor property.

  1. Refine

Once in Blueprint, the processes at the core of the Digital Blueprint can be optimized, tied to all relevant dependencies like legacy systems that it interacts with, regulations, and business rules in an intuitive, easy-to-use design environment. User stories to drive bot development can be automatically generated, as can both functional and acceptance tests.

The ingested Bots are represented within Blueprint as process diagrams with interdependencies and associations maintained within the Blueprint platform.

Visualization enables the capability for Business Analysts and Process Owners to refactor processes and add additional process logic. The COM model allows manual selection from a list of Bot functions and associates to the process step.

  1. Export

Like Blueprint’s ingestion capability, you can export an entire set of processes constituting one or multiple automations. Blueprint identifies the different sets of interconnected processes and presents them, automatically factoring for reused elements. It lets the user select or deselect individual elements for export to get precisely what they want and enables the user to choose a template of the target RPA tool into which the automation will be placed (like RE framework for UiPath, for example).

As a result, specific actions and parameters are mapped directly into your automation development environment through Blueprint’s integrations with the major RPA tools.

For each of the RPA platforms, COM has independent mappings for import and export.

COM provides an ever-increasing catalog of services that form the granular building blocks of automation.

Blueprint-Common-Object-Model-COM-RPA-Migration

Blueprint’s RPA Migration Assistant

When bots are imported into Blueprint and mapped using COM, the imported Bot is represented as a graphical Digital Blueprint within the platform. The Digital Blueprint can then be used by the RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) team members, Business Analysts, Developers, and Citizen Designers to optimize the design, add additional process functionality, and use Blueprint as a central repository to manage all automations.

Individual Bots or entire sets and projects of RPA content can be imported in a batch within Blueprint. The ingested Bots are represented as a set of Digital Blueprints, interconnected and organized in the same way they were in the source RPA tool.

Useful statistics are available via dashboards and reporting for the ingested content, including the number of comments, images, size, complexity, and quality. This provides invaluable transparency into the set of automations and can be used to prioritize the work to be done.

Organizations can also use Blueprint to document the automations and live-connect that documentation to the original process designs completed within Blueprint. Organizations can see and edit action details of the process, including the applications being called, the actions invoked, and their specific parameters. Broader editing and refactoring can be done if required, including reuse of process components.

Understanding the technical elements of Blueprint’s RPA Migration Assistant is all well and good, but it might help hearing how it’s come together in real-world applications to drive one of the biggest RPA platform migrations ever.

Case Study: How Blueprint Helped a Major Telecommunication Provider Move from Automation Anywhere to Microsoft Power Automate

Blueprint spearheaded a project to migrate a client’s digital workforce from Automation Anywhere to Power Automate Desktop using our COM migration model. The client had built its automation program by utilizing a corporate structure and templates called the ‘Framework’ and had thousands of bots of varying size and complexities.

Migrating each automated process manually would have required a massive number of FTEs (full-time employees) to complete. In addition, the nature of manual migration is prone to human error and inconsistencies. Despite the numerous challenges of migration across two platforms, Blueprint was able to successfully create a systematic way to migrate and analyze both the successful and outstanding bots in the migration process.

Read the full case study here

Are you looking to migrate to another RPA vendor? Get in touch and we can even provide you with a free estimate depending on which RPA platform you’re looking to move to and the size of your bot portfolio.

Blueprint RPA Platform Migration Free Estimate