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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation where user-configured robots can emulate the actions of users. Blue Prism is a pioneer of robotic process automation software, and this book gives you a solid foundation to programming robots with Blue Prism. If you've been tasked with automating work processes, but don't know where to start, this is the book for you!
You begin with the business case for robotic process automation, and then move to implementation techniques with the leading software for enterprise automation, Blue Prism. You will become familiar with the Blue Prism Studio by creating your first process. You will build upon this by adding pages, data items, blocks, collections, and loops. You will build more complex processes by learning about actions, decisions, choices, and calculations. You will move on to teach your robot to interact with applications such as Internet Explorer. This can be used for spying elements that identify what your robot needs to interact with on the screen.
You will build the logic behind a business objects by using read, write, and wait stages. You will then enable your robot to read and write to Excel and CSV files. This will finally lead you to train your robot to read and send emails in Outlook. You will learn about the Control Room, where you will practice adding items to a queue, processing the items and updating the work status.
Towards the end of this book you will also teach your robot to handle errors and deal with exceptions. The book concludes with tips and coding best practices for Blue Prism.
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Seitenzahl: 229
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide
Copyright © 2018 Packt Publishing
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Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Commissioning Editor: Douglas PatersonAcquisition Editor:Siddharth MandalContent Development Editor:Smit CarvalhoTechnical Editor: Sushmeeta JenaCopy Editor:Safis EditingProject Coordinator: Hardik BhindeProofreader: Safis EditingIndexer:Rekha NairGraphics:Alishon MendonsaProduction Coordinator: Priyanka Dhadke
First published: November 2018
Production reference: 1301118
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78961-044-4
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Contributors
About the author
Lim Mei Ying has extensive experience in designing, implementing and supporting Blue Prism processes as well as setting up a Robotic Operating Model for the enterprise. She has spent many hours figuring out the dos and don'ts of Blue Prism technologies and thrives on the challenge of finding new ways to solve automation problems. Mei Ying lives on the sunny island of Singapore.
About the reviewer
Saibal Goswami has a career spanning more than 12 years, during which time he has developed a strong competency in partnership management, client relationships, project management, business analysis, and operations management. He cultivated these competencies through an efficient process-feasibility study, cost/benefit analyses, resource planning, and leading and mentoring cross-functional teams in order to maximize productivity. Saibal has been associated with RPA from the very beginning. He has mastered various technical skills, including RPA process assessment and RPA CoE.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide
About Packt
Why subscribe?
Packt.com
Contributors
About the author
About the reviewer
Packt is searching for authors like you
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Download the example code files
Download the color images
Get in touch
Reviews
The Case for Robotic Process Automation
What is robotic process automation?
Finding a process suitable for automation
Calculating time savings
The process definition document
Manual process description and target systems
Process diagram
Process details
Exceptions
Summary
Building the First Blue Prism Process
Inside a Blue Prism system
Launching the Blue Prism interactive client
Creating the first process
Getting to know the Blue Prism Process Studio
Adding pages
Editing pages
Renaming a process
Saving a process
Running the process for the first time
Stepping through the process
Join the Blue Prism community
Summary
Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops
Taking a closer look at the toolbox
Pages
Inputs and outputs
Adding outputs to a page
Adding inputs to a page
Passing information from page to page
Data items
Adding a data item
Making a data item visible across pages
Blocks
Collections
Defining a collection
Loops
Adding a loop
Checking for errors using the validation tool
Summary
Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations
Actions
Adding an action to count the number of rows in a collection
Decisions
Adding a decision to decide whether to proceed to purchase the items
Building an expression
Validating expressions
Evaluating expressions
Choices
Using a choice to determine the email address of the requester
Calculations
Calculating the email notification message
Multi calc
Summary
Implementing Business Objects
What is a business object?
Creating a business object
Organizing Business Objects into folders
Taking a look at Business Studio
Additional stages available in the Business Studio toolbox
Ready, start, action!
Renaming actions
Introducing the Application Modeller
Using the Navigate stage
Launching applications
Testing the launch action
Terminating applications
Testing the terminate action
Publishing an action
Using a custom Business Object from a process
Summary
Spying Elements
Spying elements on a web page
How does spying work?
Tweaking the match criteria
Tightening the match criteria
Adding elements
Categorizing elements
More spy modes
UI Automation mode
When spying by identifying does not work
UI Automation navigator
Surface automation with region mode
Summary
Write, Wait, and Read
Creating the search action
Writing to text boxes
Clicking buttons
The Wait stage
Always use a Wait stage whenever the screen changes
The Read stage
Reading the search results
Using dynamic match attributes
Actions have inputs and outputs too
Try it yourself – clicking Add to Cart
Putting it all together
Summary
Working with Excel
Reading the shopping list from Microsoft Excel
Importing the Excel VBO
Using MS Excel VBO to open, show, and close Microsoft Excel
Before we begin
Opening Excel
Closing Excel
What is the MS Excel VBO made up of?
What is Microsoft Excel VBA?
Opening an Excel file
Reading an entire worksheet into a collection
Writing to a cell
Considerations for comma separated values (CSV)
Converting a collection to CSV
Converting a CSV to a collection
Using the MS Excel VBO with CSV files
Summary
Sending and Receiving Emails
Using the MS Outlook VBO to manage emails
Sending emails
Formatting emails
Sending attachments
Receiving emails
Basic
Advanced
Expert
Summary
Control Room and Work Queues
Introducing the control room
Publishing a process to the control room
Running a process in the control room manually
Scheduling processes
What are work queues?
Creating a work queue
Adding items to the queue
Getting the next item in the queue
Checking for more items in the queue
Marking the item as complete
Updating the status
Marking the item as an exception
Tagging the item
Filtering items
Summary
Exception Handling
Expected and unexpected exceptions
Raising exceptions
Handling exceptions
The recover stage
The resume stage
Using the recover and resume stages to gracefully handle exceptions
Using blocks to group stages that share a common error handling routine
Handling unexpected errors
Debugging and troubleshooting from the control room
Recap – running the process from the control room
Log viewer
Controlling what gets logged
Searching for errors
Exporting to Excel
Summary
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think
Preface
Recently robotics process automation has been growing increasingly popular. The arrival of robotic process tools, such as Blue Prism, has opened up a world of opportunities. Processes that could not be automated previously may now be automated. These may include processes that involve legacy applications that no one dares to upgrade for fear that something may break. Or perhaps the application came from a shrink-wrapped box and it does not provide any means for developers to extend and integrate.
In the past, the only way to get the job done was for a human to perform mundane data entry, point-and-click operations. Now platforms like Blue Prism are able to simulate exactly what humans do without the need for costly system enhancements and change requests. You just need to train the robot to mimic what the human does and the process gets automated!
The best part is, you don't have to be overly technical to build a process from the ground up. The book was written to build a single process up from scratch. While building the process, the reader is taken step by step through all the basic functions of Blue Prism, from creating a process, to building up an object and using frequently used applications such as Excel and Outlook.
Who this book is for
The idea behind this book was to help out people who may not be very technical to build their own processes. At my previous place of work, we worked extensively with end users to help automate their processes. Because the direction at that time was for end users to be the developers, we witnessed many people struggling to get the basics right. They were not trained in computer science 101, they had no concept of what a loop or collection is, and so on. And there they were, sitting in the room with us, trying to get their processes to work. They had been through the in-house foundation training but, for some reason, some of the concepts didn't stick. They really needed help to meet their deadlines.
Think of this book as that special coach sitting next to you as you build your process to help you get past the tricky bits. In this book, we have collected the experience from all these consultation sessions, collecting all the frequently asked questions to help you navigate the pitfalls of process building.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Case for Robotic Process Automation, gives some background on what robotic process automation is, and what processes are best suited for automation, as well as a brief overview of the robotic process operation model.
Chapter 2, Building the First Blue Prism Process, takes the reader through the creation of a simple process.
Chapter 3, Pages, Data Items, Blocks, Collections, and Loops, continues to build on the process by adding pages, data items, blocks, collections, and loops.
Chapter 4, Actions, Decisions, Choices, and Calculations, explores the use of actions, decisions, choices, and calculations in building the process.
Chapter 5, Implementing Business Objects, shows how to teach the robot to interact with applications such as Internet Explorer.
Chapter 6, Spying Elements, looks at spying elements, which are used to identify what the robot needs to interact with on the screen.
Chapter 7, Write, Wait, and Read, builds the logic behind the business object by using read, write, and wait stages.
Chapter 8, Working with Excel, covers reading and writing to Excel and CSV files.
Chapter 9, Sending and Receiving Emails, explains how to read and send emails using Outlook.
Chapter 10, Control Room and Work Queues, introduces the control room, adding items to a queue, processing the items, and updating the work status.
Chapter 11, Exception Handling, demonstrates how to handle errors that are both expected and unexpected in a graceful manner.
To get the most out of this book
We don't assume that you have any programming experience. All you need is the willingness to learn and a process to automate.
Download the example code files
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Download the color images
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Get in touch
Feedback from our readers is always welcome.
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The Case for Robotic Process Automation
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a clone? Someone to sit at your desk in the office to do all the tedious, mundane, and monotonous work? The reality of getting a robot to do tasks that were previously done by humans is now made possible by robotic process automation.
Robotic process automation is not a new concept. For years, people have been programming scripts to download data from websites, macros to automate spreadsheets, and recorders to record mouse-clicks. Whatever could be done by a computer could be fulfilled somehow or other in the hands of a highly skilled programmer. However, it is only recently where all these capabilities have been built into a product. And to top it off, the tools enable citizen developers to build their own processes without the technical complexity of writing oodles of code lines.
In this chapter, we will start at square one. We will take a look at what robotic process automation is all about and we will perform a quick study to pick out a process suited for RPA. The topics covered in this chapter are the following:
What is robotic process automation?
Finding a process suitable for automation
The process definition document
What is robotic process automation?
In recent times, RPA's popularity has been on the rise. The main selling point for the adoption of a robotic workforce is the reduction in cost. Given the right processes, a trained robot can mimic the same function as its human counterpart. It does not sleep, go on vacations, or take sick leave. It does not complain about overtime or require a heart-to-heart chat over performance evaluations. The cost of maintaining a robot is generally cheaper than hiring a human employee. In addition, the robot can perform repetitive tasks, freeing up the human to take on more value-added work.
Robotic process automation is a software robot. You won't actually see a physical machine with arms, legs, and wheels tapping away on a keyboard. With the help of a software program, a robot trainer records keystrokes and mouse clicks. These actions are replayed by a computer (the robot) to mimic the actions of a human.
For example, perhaps the trainer would like the robot to scan a shopping site to purchase weekly groceries.
As a human, these are the steps that he would take to purchase a box of cereal:
Visit his favorite shopping site:
http://www.amazon.com
Enter the name of the cereal into the search box and click the
Search
button
Pick out the box of cereal that he wants to buy
The robot would perform the same task in the following way:
Open the browser with the start address of
http://www.amazon.com
.
Identify the location of the
Search
box. Send keystrokes to key in the name of the cereal.
Identify the location of the
Search
button. Press the button.
Identify the location of the search results.
Based on a pre-determined algorithm, click on the desired item in the list, for example, it could simply be the first search result on the list.
The robot will store all these instructions within the software program. When requested, it will repeat what it was told to key in and enter step-by-step. It is for this reason that processes selected for robotic automation have to be repeatable.
There is no inherent intelligence. It will do exactly what the trainer tells it to do. The robot will not be able to see that there is an ongoing promotion from Shop B where they sell two boxes for the price of three. It will always pick the first item in the search results. Similarly, if the cereal has been discontinued by the manufacturer, the robot will faithfully try to search for it and purchase it. It won't automatically switch to an alternative flavor or brand. There are advances in the industry to add cognitive intelligence to RPA robots. Algorithms such as natural language processing, text analytics, and data mining are used together with RPA to produce robots that are able to respond to situations intelligently and not just based on what it has been told to do by the trainer. However, these are still emerging technologies. The kind of automation that robots do in RPA are usually the repeatable type that has predictable inputs and outputs.
Finding a process suitable for automation
There are many jobs that we do on a day-to-day basis that are repetitive. We may not realize it, but many knowledge workers today are performing tasks that are tedious, routine, and monotonous. Perhaps some of the following tasks may sound familiar to you:
Visiting a variety of websites to download reports. Followed by extracting information from each report and compiling the data into a spreadsheet for further analysis, reporting, and then emailing the consolidated report to your manager.
Checking your email for alerts and notifications. Reading the email and if it says
act on this
, you go to another system to key in an order or perform a transaction. Rinse and repeat for the remaining 100 emails in the inbox.
Downloading a report from a central dashboard and comparing the thousands of rows in the Excel with that of a master copy for discrepancies.
Basic data entry—entering rows and rows of data into a system.
The good news is, most of these tasks can be done reliably and repeatably by a software robot.
Identifying a process that is suitable for automation may turn out to be more of an art than science. While robots can be trained to perform just about any software-related job, not everything is suited for RPA.
The ideal process for RPA is one that has the following characteristics:
No abstract decision making
: The robot is going to do exactly what you tell it to do. Therefore, whatever process that you decide to automate, it's got to work the same way over and over again. If you program it to purchase a chocolate cake with cherries on the top, it's going to do that each time it runs. It's not going to suddenly decide that the weather has been hot lately and that the client may want a chocolate sundae instead (unless you tell it to).
Requires no human intervention
: The moment that you need a human to perform steps within the process, chances are, you won't be able to automate it fully. Some examples of this include steps that require a wet-ink signature or read off a physical token. You still can automate processes that have human elements in them, just not completely (also known as
assisted automation
).
Repeatable
: The robot is going to take the same series of steps each time it runs. Given the same inputs, the process will deliver the same outputs. While you can put a certain amount of rules into the flow, the results have to be predictable and repeatable for the robot to function correctly.
Takes up a considerable amount of time to run manually
: Getting the robot to run a process that takes five minutes to complete daily equates to more time savings than that of a process that takes five minutes to run annually. Go for the processes that yield higher time savings.
Interacts with systems that do not get updated unexpectedly
: One of the greatest strengths of robots is their ability to work with most applications, even legacy types. They can read screens, write to text boxes, and click most types of buttons. However, the training the robot receives to perform these actions is only good if the screen that it was trained to understand does not change. Should, for example, the application owner decide to introduce a new mandatory field to the form, the robot will have to be re-trained to understand the new field. Therefore, choose processes that work with applications that are not prone to changes. Ideally, one that you can anticipate the changes when it gets updated (which is easy to do if you or your organization is the owner) so that you have ample time to re-train the robot. Applications that are owned by others, like those on the internet, may change at will, and cause your process to go awry unexpectedly.
Requires accuracy, especially when performing data-entry
: Humans tend to make typos when keying data. If you have worked with any forms that deal with money, you would know that simply moving a decimal place in a number can be fatal. Even misspelling an address or postal code can result in a missing shipment and a bad customer experience. Robots will not make these types of mistakes, and therefore can be trusted with processes that require a high level of accuracy in data-entry.
Timeliness is important
: Robots can be tasked to look for emails or read a database 24x7. That means the moment an order comes in, even in the wee hours of the night, the robot can process it rather than waiting for a human to report to work the next day to do the job.
Calculating time savings
If you are looking for that perfect process to automate, you would typically start with a chat with the business users to take an inventory of all the processes that they currently own. List them in a spreadsheet, and put down all the key considerations in a weighted list. There will probably be a shortlist of potentials, and there will likely be several discussions with the user on which process provides the greatest automation value.
To help, you might have a spreadsheet that records the steps in each manual process, and the time taken to execute each step as shown in the following diagram. If we add the estimated time to complete the task of searching the item, purchasing the item, tracking the package, and receiving it—the weekly purchase of groceries takes around 2709 minutes per year of our time:
The total amount of timed saved per year for each process is then collated into a master spreadsheet as shown in the following screenshot. We've added a few more fictitious processes into the list just to give you an idea of what the list may look like:
From the consolidated list, you will get a better idea of which processes to shortlist as candidates that will deliver the biggest time savings when automated. In this little demonstration, it appears that the weekly purchase of groceries would be an ideal candidate for automation.
