Blue Prism Capture- The Latest Entrant to Process Mining and Task Mining

Blue Prism’s Jo Davison posted on the community blog about Blue Prism going to replace the current Process Discovery tool with a new tool to be launched in November 2020. Blue Prism’s “Discover” roadmap category for November also includes new tool named “Capture” from Blue Prism.

What is Capture?

Blue Prism’s Capture is an On-Prem Downloadable tool, which has the ability to record every interaction that the user performs on his/her desktop using a combination of computer vision with task mining.

With Computer Vision, It can capture an image of user interaction points with the application and with Task Mining, it can ensure that the application interactions are documented.

Along with the step details, the new tool has ability to generate the key process statistics and a process map as well.

Once you record the steps, the user can also review and edit the steps to make it more meaningful.

The Output of Blue Prism Capture is a Process Definition Document (PDD) in word format, Visio diagrams for process diagram, and a JSON file.

License:

As other Blue Prism peripheral products, it will be free to use for Blue Prism’s customers.

How to get the software and how to install?

Capture will be available for customers to be downloaded from portal. Once downloaded, it can be installed by simple intuitive clicks.

Update: 18/11/2020: Blue Prism has made capture available for all it’s customers now . You can download it from this link

Key Considerations:

As of now Capture is slotted to work on Windows 10 with Chrome (v 84 and above) and Edge (v84 and above)

My Experience

I had a first-hand experience of “Capture” Beta version 1.0 (updated August 25th) and it looked a very simple yet promising tool.

• I was able to record all the steps without any fuss and the generated output could serve a good enough template to modify/create the PDD for the process.
• Tried recording applications such as Excel, Word, SAP, Oracle ERP, Windows File manager, Outlook, Winzip etc, and it was able to record each step.
• The generated output was satisfactory if not a finished product with all the interactions well documented. The language used for documentation was also very good.
• Having a free software to help generate the formatted documentation was a big PLUS for me.
• The Visio was neat and I was able to modify the diagram as required.
• The Ability to blur/hide client sensitive data in the screenshots was a welcome functionality from data privacy and security point of view. It also frees up some time for the BA in doing it manually.
• On the Negative side, I faced issues while trying to undo some of the steps, like deleting a condition. It was not user intuitive in the version I tested. However, I will need some more exploration to comment on it.
• One Known issue was that, it wasn’t able to work with multiple monitors as of now, However, since I was testing a BETA, this should be addressed during the GA release.
• Another Negative point that I found was, I was not able to group different screenshots /steps during editing, Again I believe BP is going to address that before GA release.
• I would welcome if BP can provide auto grouping of screenshots/steps per application interaction which was found to be missing as of now.

Verdict:

• Since it’s a free tool for Blue Prism customers, I don’t see any reason why not to use it!
• It’s a good tool to generate preformatted documentation for PDD and lessen the workload on BA’s

Keep Learning! and keep exploring.