RPA Blue Prism integration with Appian - licensing

Does anyone know and can share how purchasing & licensing Blue Prism via Appian Corp. works? BOth tools are expensive, when purchased separately; so we are hoping that dome type of "rebate" or savings can be achieved by buying both as a "package" from Appian. The user Karthik mentioned (in a thread, Jan 2017) they created a service account and the BOT logs in to Appian using the service account credentials. Does that mean that many BOTs can use a single Appian user license? Are there other licensing models, based on number of BOTs and/or number of Appian processes or tasks?

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  • Please contact your Appian account team regarding the pricing of Appian RPA with Blue Prism.

    In order to answer your question can you provide additional information about the use case you are trying to solve?

    Thanks!

  • Having said the above - here is an example use case we are trying to solve.
    1. We have this homegrown Web Portal Application that runs on Internet Explorer, in which my company's agents capture (and later look up) profile information about our Customers - often while talking to the Customer live.
    2. An agent logs into this Portal, and wants to search for a Customer based on a Customer Id (a unique numeric identifier, generated by the Oracle database that masters all our Customer Profiles and is one of the primary data stores behind our Web Portal). They typically receive (from email or a shared storage drive) an Excel spreadsheet with several Customer records to work trough; they paste a specific Customer Id (one at a time, working thru the spreadsheet) into the "Customer Id" search field in the Portal, and click on "Search".
    3. Two outcomes are possible:
    a) the Customer Id is bad-data (never existed), or was an active Customer but got deactivated (has left us); or something is wrong with the data & and they have no purchased Products - in all cases, 0 records are retrieved... the agent then updates the Excel sheet with a note “NO CUSTOMER INFORMATION IN PORTAL” for the row with that respective Customer Id.
    b) the Customer Id identifies a "regular", active Customer with 1 or more Current Products - in this case, one of 2 things may happen:
    b.1) the list contains 1 or 2 or 3 distinct Products, e.g. "TV”, “Phone Line”, “Internet”; or just "TV"...
    the agent then updates the Excel record for the Customer ID with the note “NO DUPLICATE”
    b.2) the list contains at least 1 pair of "duplicate" Products, e.g. "TV”, “TV”, “Internet"...
    the agent then updates the Excel record for the Customer ID with the note “DUPLICATES”
    4. When the agent thus processes the entire Excel file, they send an email to a specified address "xxxx@yyy.com" (belonging to a "Billing Check" team) after manually pasting, into the email body, a hyperlink to the shared-drive path of the Excel file.
  • What we would like to do with Appian:
    1. Have the information coming in that Excel sheet sent to the Agent as an Appian task
    a) either with the same Excel sheet as today, but attached/uploaded to the Appian task
    or b) with an Appian form filled by [whoever fills the Excel today] & DB table(s) capturing the data, instead of the Excel; and the Agent seeing the content of that Appian record in a form
    2. The Agent would still swivel-chair & log into the Web Portal, and do all the checking as today; and record the "DUPLICATE" or "NO DUPLICATE" notes as today, either:
    a) into the same Excel sheet as today, and re-attach the updated sheet back to the Appian record
    or b) the Agent updating the notes field of that Appian record via a form
    3. Appian could automatically email the address "xxxx@yyy.com" (belonging to a "Billing Check" team) with either:
    a) the same Excel sheet attached to the email
    or b) if the "Billing Check" team are users of Appian too, this could be an Appian task assigned to them, pointing them to the same form/table with Customer records that the Agent updates in 2.b)
  • Optimization we would like to additionally do with BluePrism, if we bought it too:
    1. Have a BOT (or is it 2 or more BOTs?) doing the work of the Agent from the Appian scenario above
    2. The BOT would be activated by the Appian task that has the Excel sheet attached or has a link to the initial Appian DB records with equivalent data
    3. The BOT would "retrieve" (from the screen-scrape of either the Excel sheet once it opens it, or the Appian form displaying those DB records) the Customer Ids; log into the Portal & paste each Id into the Portal search field; then "recognize" from the screen-scraped, returned results in the Portal whether that Customer's Profile contains "0 Products", "NO DUPLICATE" or "DUPLICATES"; and finally paste the appropriate note into the Excel sheet or Appian form.
    4. In the end, the BOT (or: last BOT in the series?) would either send an email attaching the Excel file; or complete the previous (Agent's) Appian task & trigger the next Appian task which gets assigned to the "Billing Check" team,
  • Final questions for Appian Corp:
    1) Can the above be done with Appian & BluePrism?
    2) What is the licensing model (no $$ prices required - just logical model) for this? E.g. the Agent needs an Appian named- user license, as does the "Bill Check" person, and we also need 1 BOT license on the BluePrism side? Or do we need 1 BOT license for the BOT that opens & updates the Excel file; and a different BOT that completes or assigns Appian tasks?
  • Thanks for the details of the use cases. Yes, we can automate this entire process using Appian and Blue Prism.

    Regarding licensing:
    One bot can do multiple processes so you do not need multiple bot licenses
    A user license will be needed for the agent to use Appian.

    I would also like to tell you that Appian now has a new offering for contact centre operations that brings together a lot of new capabilities (in addition to RPA) www.appian.com/.../
    we announced this last month at Appian World 2018 so there may be even greater potential for automation and customer experience improvement for your scenario. I encourage you to reach out to Appian Account team to get the details about licensing and the new intelligent contact centre solution.

    Thanks!