London, UK – 5 July 2022: BP3, a global leader in designing and delivering business process automation programs, today announced it has completed the acquisition of specialist automation consultancy Extra Technology. The acquisition will strengthen BP3’s position in a rapidly growing intelligent automation market in EMEA and the US, with Extra Technology having proven itself to be resilient to market changes over recent years.

The acquisition of one of the global leaders in workload automation is the seventh in BP3’s history and plays a key role in BP3’s growth strategy, ensuring BP3 remains on course to become the leading provider of intelligent automation services globally.

The deal will see Extra Technology operate as a BP3 company and separate legal entity, before being fully integrated into BP3 over the course of the next two years.

The addition of Extra Technology’s unparalleled workload automation capabilities and expertise, backed by a team of fully-certified experts, many whom come from workload automation vendor and senior IT manager backgrounds, will allow BP3 to significantly expand its current offering.

The synergy between BP3’s offering and client base and that of Extra Technology will allow customers of both companies to benefit from a broader portfolio of top-tier workload automation and intelligent automation solutions, as well as intelligent document processing, process automation, robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence.

The acquisition will also provide customers with support for additional software packages and access to an increased number of experts in the field of automation and artificial intelligence.

Together, these expanded capabilities will allow customers to scale and reap the rewards of automation faster, while cementing BP3’s expanded presence in the EMEA market and allowing it to broaden its appeal to US-based customers.

In addition to Extra Technology’s robust workload automation business, BP3 will acquire Extra Technology’s 20 employees and London office, with all employees at both companies expected to remain in their current roles.

Scott Francis, CEO, BP3, says: “Extra Technology is laser focused on customer success, and by welcoming Extra Technology to the BP3 family we will be able to better serve our mutual clients in the UK and Europe more broadly. Our clients are looking for better solutions to modernise their applications that run their core business, and fresh ways to automate vast amounts of physical and digital paperwork. Together, we can meet those needs more completely for our clients on both continents.”

Mark Mannion, CEO, Extra Technology, adds: “This is a very exciting time for everyone at Extra Technology. We’ve had the pleasure of working with BP3 to deliver great results for clients before – and we’re even more excited about doing that under the same banner going forward. Both our company culture and our product offering are closely aligned to BP3’s and together we will be able achieve even more than we have alone. The combination of our robust solutions and ecosystems of partners will strengthen our joint offering to customers, both existing and new, and provide new opportunities for employees.

-End-

About BP3 Global, Inc.:

BP3 gives people faster ways to get things done. We streamline and automate the processes that drive your business, with clients across a number of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing telecommunications, hospitality and travel. We have achieved an unprecedented 99% success rate, bringing more focus, more foresight, and more follow-up to every project. It is how and why some of the world's more respected brands— such as Charter Communications, Keller Williams, and Eli Lilly — rely on BP3. BP3 is a leader in Forrester’s Q3 2020 Wave of Digital Process Automation Service Providers and has recently won partner of the year honors from Automation Anywhere and Camunda.

For more information, please visit http://www.bp-3.com.

About Extra Technology

Founded in 2007, Extra Technology is a leading provider of expert automation solutions, as well as consultancy and education across a variety of automation technology, including workload automation, process automation, automated operations and release automation.

The company also specialises in integrating diverse multi-vendor automation environments into a single Intelligent Automation platform, boosting compliance and efficiency and radically reducing costs. Unlike other technology integrators, Extra Technology offers extensive, real-world experience, thereby delivering significant value to customers globally.

The 2022 Automation Anywhere Bot Games included a trio of exciting challenges that tested developers’ coding skills and problem-solving abilities to the very limit. Developers with varying degrees of experience took part in the event, with many also gaining new knowledge and expertise as they battled it out, trying to find the most efficient and inventive methods to achieve the best possible times. Only relatively few competitors completed all 3 tasks, each more demanding than the last, receiving the esteemed ‘trifecta certificate’. I was one of the successful challengers and this blog is a report of how me and my team performed in this year’s competition.

The 3 Challenges

Challenge 1 – Auction Sniper

The 2022 Bot Games kicked off with a unique challenge called ‘Auction Sniper’. Contestants were made to compete in winning an auction bid for a pair of shoes with the least possible time remaining before the bidding closed. The key for this task was not about speed, but absolute precision, ensuring your bot made the closing bid at the very last moment. The Extra Technology team used our extensive expertise and cunning to all make it into the 0.00X seconds remaining club, with Zakk Rockett our Head of Training and Pre-Sales Practice Lead achieving an astonishing exact 0 seconds remaining. When the Automation Anywhere adjudicators suggested that maybe Zakk’s perfect score was a lucky anomaly, he immediately achieved an exact 0 seconds remaining again. Lightning had struck twice – or more accurately Zakk had got off to the perfect start.

Challenge 2 – Quarter Close

Week 2’s challenge was the ‘quarter close’ challenge, the task involves building a bot to help the finance team who are dealing with their tough end-of-fiscal-quarter checks. This task was a bit more challenging than the previous one, and there was a lot more variation amongst the bot games competitors in the methods performed to complete the task. With our knowledge of the huge arsenal of commands that Automation Anywhere provides, this task proved no problem for the Extra Technology team. (Even our most junior developer is an AA Certified Master and has been immersed in Automation Anywhere for years, we really do enjoy getting into the nuts-and-bolts of how these products work. Our dedication is understandable as A360 is fun to work with – and that dedication is turbo-charged as our inter-team competitiveness is off the charts!)

One trick I used and spread around the community for this task was to open up the various accounts in separate chrome tabs and use the simulate keystrokes to function as hotkeys to switch between them as needed. This allowed me to shave-off valuable seconds and achieve a better overall time.

Challenge 3 – Cyber Loss Prevention

Week 3 saw the third and final challenge: ‘Cyber Loss Prevention’. Automation Anywhere had dialled up in difficulty with the purpose of stumping a lot of the competitors – the ‘trifecta certificate’ is a precious prize and not given-away easily. The Extra Technology team revels in a challenge, so we adopted the #TeamExtraTechPower hashtag and felt more than well-equipped to deal with the challenge, especially with our many years of experience and vast and extensive knowledge of the latest Automation Anywhere A360 release.

The instructions were to build a bot that would help in the serious problem of credit card fraud. The scenario set up a situation where a Dark Web Location known as Ryan’s Club had recently published a large dump of stolen credit card information. The bot had to scrape the partially available information and crosscheck it large and complex customer database from a financial institution called Eagle One Financial. If matches are found then the customer is added to a cancellation list. This challenge proved too difficult for most of the initial competitors, but our team persevered and earned our Trifecta certificates.

Bot Games final thoughts

The Bot Games was a great experience for us at the Extra Technology Team, it was a great set of challenges and we thoroughly enjoyed competing and getting involved and sharing our solutions and tips with the Bot Games and RPA community.

The first challenge was a great demonstration of the power of A360, showing good results for competitors of all abilities (and encouraging truly expert users to produce phenomenal results, like our team’s perfect and near perfect scores).

By the final challenge Automation Anywhere’s challenge setters had raised the bar to ensure that the Trifecta certificates maintained a genuine prestige. But it is important to note that the ‘Cyber Loss Prevention’ bots demonstrated a truly powerful product, harnessed by expert developers, undertaking a business critical task in a very short time. It was a great example of why business leaders need an appreciation of the true power of Intelligent Automation and how it is frequently a organisations best ‘get-out-of-jail’ card when business challenges present themselves.

Thank you to Automation Anywhere for the excellent organisation of the event, it was very engaging and interactive and my praise goes out to the Developer Evangelist team: Micah Smith, Lara Argento and Arjun S Meda. The Extra Technology team actively encourage all RPA enthusiasts to take part next year’s Bot Games, whether you are a seasoned RPA veteran or a new starter. It offers a fantastic opportunity to be challenged, tests your ability to think laterally, and gives you a chance to experience using one of the most sophisticated automation tools on the market today.

Learn about Automation Anywhere from true experts

For developers who want to be personally coached by Zakk 'Zero Seconds' Rockett and myself Aidan Szczurek, please contact us for details of our public courses. I look forward to competing with you all next year!

Business leaders who want to understand how Intelligent Automation (RPA and beyond, including; Intelligent Document Processing, Machine Learning, Process Mining, Natural Language Understanding, AI) are encouraged to attend our Executive Course. We have positive references from C-levels, Finance Managers, Operations Managers, HR Execs and Business Specialists and from most sectors, including; Retail, Banking, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Biotech.

About the author

Aidan is a key member of Extra Technology’s award-winning Intelligent Automation team. An Automation Anywhere Certified Master RPA Professional and Certified Training Instructor. Aidan has worked with Automation Anywhere since September 2019 (gaining over 15 vendor certifications). In-line with Extra Technology’s mantra of using the best tool for any job Aidan’s Intelligent Automation experience and skillset is extensive - he is an ABBYY Vantage Certified Business Analyst, a certified expert.ai Professional, and holds certifications for UiPath and Microsoft RPA offerings too.

Aidan develops and delivers training courses. His students enjoy working with Automation Anywhere’s products because of the vendor’s focus on useability and positive user experience. Aidan’s courses receive exemplary feedback, notably because of a generous helping of practical exercises solving everyday business challenges.

Perhaps Aidan’s greatest skill is his ability to teach students of all abilities, adapting the course pace and offering special attention, as required. His soft skills have been honed over many years, as a black belt Karate instructor, a Primary School Teaching Assistant and Customer Services Team Leader.

In his free-time Aidan likes to participate in sports including Rock Climbing, Football, Cricket, Karate, Cycling. He also enjoys working with animals. As an occasional quiz-master of the Extra Technology quiz evening Aidan shares the mantle of toughest question-setter (did we mention his degree in Zoology?) with his colleague George.

Extra Technology’s CEO, Mark Mannion, says “Aidan is personable, intelligent, diligent, enthusiastic, and a dedicated team-player. From the first moment we met him, it was clear that Aidan strives to deliver the highest possible standards of customer satisfaction. Every great team needs an Aidan!”

Copyright © Extra Technology Ltd. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

Edd has worked for the NHS for over 20 years. He was recently drafted to lead the Finance department of the NHS Nightingale Hospital North West. In the UK, Nightingale hospitals are the epitome of agile, fully functioning brand new hospitals that sprang into life as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Edd is the perfect person to drive complex programs at scale at the drop of a hat. Innovative thinking is Edd's speciality, and he has a long history of business improvement, performance optimisation and a solid agile delivery record.

It was Edd that oversaw Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust's adoption of Automation Anywhere, identifying the process that offered great tangible ROI with many more intangible benefits for the UK's second largest hospital network. Delivering a swift return-on-investment and establishing the confidence in Intelligent Automation, creating a solid foundation from which he is now building-on to make continued improvements for the foreseeable future.

Edd Berry, Programme Finance Director at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust. Edd has worked for the NHS for over 20 years delivering tangible change, business optimisation and process improvement.

Extra Technology is proud and privileged to be working with Edd, to achieve efficiencies across all aspects of UK Healthcare delivery, from administrative efficiencies to clinical advances. It's great to have him back and we caught up with him recently, where he kindly agreed for us to share - in his own words - the Trust's experience of their automation journey with Extra Technology:

Edd, how has the RPA journey been so far?

It's been really interesting, and certainly a lot more interesting and exciting than we would have thought back in the beginning. Clearly the pandemic has had an enormous impact on the NHS. Even areas far away from the front line - we've really felt that too. I think to get to where we've got now, feels like a massive achievement.

Why did you pick the process you did, and your first Bot?

Initially, we thought we'd look at several small finance processes – simple reports we produce every week, or every month – purely to gain confidence in RPA. We had lots of advice from Extra Technology, and I'm very pleased that we followed their guidance and thought much bigger. Selecting a process that would bring significant opportunities is not only a great ROI but doing something that would be beneficial to support our staff. Automating a process that everybody would understand would also be a real showcase for RPA across the whole organisation.

What are the benefits you are seeing?

We chose to go with complete end-to-end invoicing processing and that was based on around a quarter of a million invoices we process a year. And I'm very pleased to say that now we're getting really close to that number. It's been a lot of hard work and Extra Technology have been extremely patient with us. But now, the numbers are really coming through and all of a sudden, we can see that we've built something that's really special. I also think it's really going to change the way that we work and have a huge impact on the department.

What lessons have your learned?

We've definitely learned that it's worth 'thinking big' from the beginning. Pull it off, and with all the right support you'll have a rock solid case for automation across your organisation. Equally, when you go big, you need to expect there to be a few hiccups in the road; things a small project may not have to contend with. You just have to be brave, think big and persevere.

What advice would you give to people starting their automation journey?

Get all the key people involved from the very beginning. An exec sponsor is an absolute key, as is a dedicated IT support – they must be involved from the very beginning. I would also say you would need to get good external help if you're new to this. This is a big thing, a new technology area and without external expertise, it would be a significant struggle verses our experience. We've certainly learnt a lot from working with Extra Technology and at the beginning I think you just need some hand-holding. The other key thing is not to assume anything. Don't assume who your supporters will be. You might be fearful of introducing automation – it could just be the reverse. Just remain honest and remain true to your values. For us, that's improving the lives of our workers, whilst making the best use of our resources. So ultimately, we can support the delivery of excellent patient care.

What are MFT's next plans with Automation Anywhere?

These are extraordinary times for healthcare, and the way we work across our services from clinical to corporate has changed and a good chunk of that has changed for the better, but they've changed significantly. We've taken big steps forward from the invoicing Bots that we've built and some other Bots in Finance as well, and we really need to use that to showcase what's possible. I certainly don't have the answer about where all the opportunities are, but I know there are hundreds of them, and I know that my colleagues will.

What areas are you looking to target next?

I certainly have a list of processes from within Finance and across the organisation, from back-office functions through to clinical processes and they will keep us busy for all of next year, but as Extra Technology held my hand and my team's hand at the very beginning, I think now I need to show them what's possible and hold their hand and get them to 'think big' I think then the plan will write itself.

The project in summary

The NHS finance department processes over 250,000 financial documents per year. With a minimum saving of 10 minutes per document, this automation provides an efficiency saving of approximately £2million. Irrespective of the sectors we work in, the Automation Anywhere technologies used in this project will be applicable and will work in your organisation.

Click here to see how Extra Technology delivered rapid ROI when using Automation Anywhere's market-leading RPA product and how we improved patient outcomes by integrating AA with other leading Ai technologies.

At Extra Technology, we push the boundaries by getting the most out of Intelligent Automation, exploring what's available in Ai and continuing to make the most of this wonderful opportunity to transform and improve the organisations we work for.

Please get in touch. We'd love to hear from you.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

About the authors

Mark Mannion is Extra Technology's CEO and a recognised expert in Intelligent Automation and Enterprise Automation. Mark advocates a pragmatic approach to Automation, encouraging a policy of using 'the best tool for the job'.

Prior to co-founding Extra Technology, Mark worked in senior automation roles since 1992, architecting and delivering robust, scalable solutions for many of the world's biggest banks and working with leading automation vendors.

Mark is a regular guest speaker and panellist at Automation seminars, conferences and user group events.

Edd Berry joined the NHS over 20 years ago, quickly establishing a reputation for delivering efficiencies, optimising performance and improving patient experience.

Edd's roles have included Head of Performance and Information at Manchester Community Health, Deputy Director of Finance and Business Intelligence at Wirral Community NHS Foundation Trust, Programme Finance Director at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust and, most recently, as Director of Finance at Nightingale North West Hospital.

Copyright © Extra Technology Ltd. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.

Not surprisingly, as a result, invoices are frequently handled by Bots. After all, the invoice process is integral to most financial transactions.

Those Pesky Invoices

Invoices can be incredibly tricky to work with, and this is primarily due to a lack of uniformity between invoices from different companies. It can make extracting information from them a Developer’s nightmare, even if all invoices are presented in a single format (and we cannot dangerously assume that they will all be PDFs). Organisations will frequently use completely different layouts, rendering each invoice unique in its format and presentation.

I discovered how difficult this can make automating invoice processes during one of my first forays in RPA. Tasked with sorting invoices into folders depending on the organisation they were from, I found that even finding a way to ascertain the invoice’s sender was a struggle. Typically, the invoices being processed identified their sender using an image (which was useless for the Bot’s purposes, as it needed to extract a name) or if using text, located it in an entirely new position.

A Solution? Maybe Not...

By law, a company’s registration number and registered address are required to be present on any invoice. Using this one (supposed) constant, I was able to create a workable solution to the issue.

First, the PDF had to be converted to a text file, which I did using Automation Anywhere’s ‘convert PDF to text’ feature. Once this had been done, the file could be searched for its company registration number. As the registration number for English and Welsh companies is supposed to be included after the text ‘Registered in England and Wales Number’, it was a simple matter to copy this number to a variable. Then, using the website ‘Companies House’, this company number could then be entered into a search bar with Automation Anywhere’s web recorder. The name of the company that the search tool returns was then used to name a folder, into which the invoice and any other invoices with that registration number could be saved.

Unfortunately, a simple task transformed into an extremely complicated one and it was soon apparent this method wasn’t going to work well. Whilst it was able to sort a small portion of the invoices given for testing, the majority still could not be processed by this method due to a variety of reasons. Some PDFs were encrypted and couldn’t be converted to a text file. Others were completely missing a registration number. But the greatest problem was that most company numbers were not preceded by the correct text, which then meant that most of the files wound up being uncategorised. I realised that I had to change the method of identifying company codes to be the first eight (or seven) digit number after any instances of the word ‘company’, ‘reference’ or ‘registered’ appeared in a line. This made the Bot able to sort most of the invoices, however, a few always managed to slip through the net, resulting in the method having to become yet more convoluted.

This process wound up being an imperfect one. Even if I’d put code in place to catch every single format that might have occurred, there was still no guarantee that an invoice would adhere to any of them. Our financial officer would still have needed to sort through many invoices that had been added to the unclassified folder. In addition to this, the next task required would have been to extract data from these invoices, which would likely have experienced similar (if somewhat less complicated) issues to ascertaining their parent company.

The Solution? Definitely.

I dedicated some time to thinking about how I would have solved this frustrating puzzle.

Fortunately, the answer was presented on a silver platter by Automation Anywhere™, in the form of their IQ Bot.

IQ Bot features a variety of pre-made domains, including an ‘invoices’ domain. Selecting this allows the user to draw a list of form fields in a manner like the ‘extract form fields’ command for PDFs. It also allows them to capture ‘table’ fields in addition to extracting key information from the document. When creating fields in this tool, the creator can also capture various identifying headers from nearby.

On documents with a different layout, the IQ Bot will search for these headers first. It may of course, not find them. At this point, the most interesting part of this Bot will become apparent: the machine learning that it uses. The Bot will prompt a user to show it whether it has missed any fields or collected the wrong information from them. It will remember any changes made by the user, therefore learning the layout of new documents dynamically.

This is initially more of a time investment for the user than a typical Bot, but eventually, an IQ Bot should be able to extract information from any document that we give it without requiring any type of human input. This includes entirely new layouts that it has not previously been corrected on.

In my experience, it is clear that IQ Bot is the logical tool to process invoices and is capable to deal with the large numbers of variations that can occur in these documents.

IQ Bot can be used as a ‘normal command’ when developing in Automation Anywhere™ and I strongly recommend anyone automating invoice processes do so.

About the Author
George is a Master Certified Automation Anywhere™ Developer, delivering critical Bots for global organisations in multiple sectors. A key member of our technical team, equally at home undertaking face-to-face process analysis with customers or coding in our R&D lab. He contributes to the best practices policies set-out by our Centre of Excellence and works closely with our CTO defining future strategies.

Copyright © Extra Technology Ltd. All Rights Reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.