This article was originally written by Avanade alum Nils Haugland Winther.

Over the past few years, I have worked intensively with the Avanade Intelligent Automation offering for our clients to create robust services. At Avanade, we work with a lot of intelligent automation tools and we’ve built some specific capabilities around reporting capabilities with Blue Prism processes in Microsoft Power BI. I’d like to share with you some of the RPA Reporting capabilities that we offer.

Why RPA reporting?
A lot of businesses turn to process automation to optimize back-office operations. RPA can help you bring speed and efficiency into your cost optimization program by introducing a digital workforce to do your process handling.

One of the advantages of a digital workforce is that it can provide you with instant data. Thereby, you can get very specific information about how the processes in your organization are performing. Typically, you would look at things like how fast your items are being processed, how many processes or line items are being processed and the data quality.

Ultimately, you will set a business goal such as reducing back-office inefficiency, freeing up time for value adding work activities, or improving customer experience.

What can be achieved?
Combining Blue Prism with Power BI enables you to get insights into how your robots are performing and how this affects your business. It enables you to share that information out of the Blue Prism environment and feed it into your organization for making better decisions based on the data.

The new Data Gateways functionality in Blue Prism version 6.5 is a great way to easily access data, but it might not capture all your data needs.

With Power BI, you can connect to the Blue Prism Database, extract the information you are looking for, transform the data, and build visualizations that provide the insights you need. This could be things like number of queue items, process automation degree, volume trends, pipeline status and license utilization. In addition, you could track your business case by analyzing hours and FTE saving calculations. Below are some examples of how it might look.

How is it done?
With Power BI you can connect to a variety of data sources and bring it together for data analysis, transformation and visualization. You can then publish this data to the cloud where you can access it from a variety of devices. You can easily share datasets, reports, and dashboards to groups or individuals in your organization. It all starts with figuring out what your reporting needs are and what goals you have.

At Avanade, we are experts at helping you with your intelligent automation and analytics needs, and we can help you set up KPIs and implement the solutions to meet those targets.

Learn how RPA reporting tools and capabilities can increase productivity for your organization.