I remember a time when the company I work for was first getting into electronic automation. The main driver of these automation’s were Excel macros. When we implemented our first RPA, it was amazing
First Process
Without going into any proprietary information, we helped run reports out of an ERP system for audit requests. The auditor would simply fill out an Excel form with reports that needed to run and the robot would pick it up a few times a day and start running the reports. The robot would then download the report and put it in a shared drive and email the auditor.
Benefits
Getting source information from the ERP system is the best way for audit to get answers.
Robot runs multiple times during business hours for fast turnarounds.
Functional team does not have to run reports for people outside their team anymore.
Less hand offs means less chance of information mix up or lost in email.
Notifications to auditor means they know when it is completed.
Simple as that.
I feel like if we share our first experiences with RPA, it would help new people who are wanting to get into RPA know that everyone has started somewhere and it does not take a major change in a company to get started. Just small steps
Please use the paragraph titles “First Process” and “Benefits” in your replies so it is easier for everyone to read your replies.
The first process we utilized RPA for in my previous company was pretty simple, but saved a ton of time.
Users emailed a populated Excel form to the bot’s inbox.
The bot would take the attachments from each of those emails and retrieve some data from a SQL database.
Finally, the bot would use this information to scrape data and screenshots from our ERP system and email it back to the original requester (to be used as backup).
Benefits
Increased accuracy/reduced transcription errors - Users would log into the ERP system and manually copy/paste the necessary data into their working documents. Pretty frequently they would accidentally mistype a value or copy/paste an incorrect field.
Increased speed - The bot was able to navigate through the ERP system at least 5-10x faster than users were able to.
Employee satisfaction/morale - Never underestimate how much people appreciate having the drudge-work removed from their desk. We were able to re-allocate the time saved from this bot and let our users focus on more analytical, fulfilling work.
I started working for my first company in a Telecom Project.
Telecom project has lot of chores for the employees which they can not skip. Never thought we can make system work by itself being unaware of technology like RPA.
I learnt Uipath all of my own having no guidance from anyone. Yeah, it was hard in the starting as I was unaware how things work in RPA. But working hard and consistent learning made me a master of few things which I know now.
First Process:
There is a tool, BMC Remedy in which ITIL team used to raise change Requests(RFC) for deploying objects into production. I automated this process where users need to specify the date for deployment and the robot raises the request all of its own and mails all the approvers for the request. Additionally it sends reminders to all the people in this process.
Benifits:
1)This process was done earlier in one man hour everyday entire week and now robot takes < 2 minutes.
2)This rooted to all the current automatons in project.
3)You know the sweetness when you make the system do your day work while you relax.
As you may find in my forum profile, I’m originally a data warehousing engineer. Totally different from RPA. Some how, at the beginning of this year, the company that i’m working for now wanted to get a UiPath partnership and they waned us to do the certification. That’s the first time I thought of RPA. Since the full story is available in my profile description, I’ll make it short here.
So, with that I started learning RPA thorugh UiPath academy. I developed a great interest on this field too. With that, somehow out of around 90 people who participated to get the certification in our company, I was the one to get certified first before the deadline they gave. I took only two weeks to learn from nothing to certified level. Being the first certified guy in our company during that time (February) they were able to get the partnership with UiPath in one of the local events that was held. To celebrate the partnership and my success, there were some small appreciation as well… Since then, I have being involved with this and being gaining knowledge like crazy… That was the small start of my journey…
First Process:
Well, we have a HR system where we mark the attendance of our employees. However, the HR team spends about 8 hours a week to regularize the attendance of about 100 people. This attendance regularizing directly affects the payroll. It was a highly manual process. I was asked to lead the automation project for this. We used the UiPath orchestrator as well to build it. The process was also a slow process that took a credulous amount of time. So we had to optimize the regularization process as well to make it efficient. On top of the optimized process, we did the automation…
So basically, the robot will capture the list of all employees, login to the system, scan through all of their attendance data, find the irregularities based on the business rules that we have implemented, and then shoots out an email to the employees who needs to correct their attendance. Along with that, behind the scenes it will also populate another excel sheet which is required to be sent to the finance for the payroll processing. This will also be mailed to the HR department and finance for further processing…
Benefits:
Slow and manual process was optimized to be more efficient
The manual process that took 8 hours a week now takes only 25 minutes
Payroll is processed even before the due date
Hours worth of time is saved
Hassle of the HR guys are now relieved as they watch how the bot does it in a happy mood
I started with UiPath RPA a year ago and have worked in varies different roles earlier like QA, SEO, .net, etc. I was intrigued by RPA a lot and wanted to learn it, and started it out and it’s a lot bumpy and the learning curve I’ll say is quite steep but quite enjoyable cause you learn daily something new
First Process (Complete Process):
We were doing a recon for a food partner, in that we had to pull report from all the stores they had for all the delivery partners such as Zomato, Food Panda, Swiggy and Uber Eats. After pulling in the report, we had to do the calculation on that basis for the previous date. At end the report was mailed to the concern team.
Benefits:
The whole process manually used to take 4 hours + which was cut down to a 45 minute task.
The manual recon task had possibility of errors, which was reduced and the accuracy was improved.
The employee who used to do this was re-assigned to another task and the work load was decreased on that basis.
In end, my first project made me learn a lot and I keep on upgrading my code to improve the efficiency which helps me in my future projects as well
In end cheers to all the fellow forum members in making the learning fun filled
I selected one of many First Processes from my different projects. The others were nice as well.
First Process
BOT receives Email with Attachment
Bot downloads Attachments and reads in Excel
Bot does a Lookup in an ERP System for the information from EXCEL
Bot does a mapping for some values, based on a mapping definition
Bot enters in LOB specific System some Values computed from the previous steps
Bot notifies the Business Users by email about the result of the Process (Success, Missing Mappings, Error …)
Benefits:
Automated Process reduces the work load for the Business Users and they can focus on other tasks
Bot is doing the process in a fraction of time compaired to manually execution
With the entire RPA Infrastructure the Process is transparently
With an integrated Housekeeping mechanism the functionality and performance of the RPA Infrastructure is addressed and handled
another important success point, once the first BOT is rolled out: The RPA Infrastructure is available and ready for the next crowding RPA Processes
I mention this explicitly as in the first rollout a lot of things can happen and has to be solved
Setting Up Robot IDs, Working GPO, Firewall Adjustments ……
I would like to add some findings (a incomplete short list) on topics we are looking when we do our projects Findings / Lessons Learned
Have a diagram, Workflow plan always in place that is defining the BOT implementation (as Business Process and Bot implementations can sometimes be different) that can be used for communications
Take care about the RPA-ed System performance and sync the BOT with this. This Point is major Building Block for the BOT success
Slice the work in Subworkflows and each has to be testable standalone (e.g. with invoke from a test.xaml)
Think on the different skills of the team members and do implementations that can be understand by all members
I am back with My First Professional Project experience , just completed it. In reality, I am a Certified Advanced RPA developer and having Electronics & Communication background. Minimal coding experience, thus, faced many issue when needed commands to complete the steps in the workflow.
Basic Tasks in the First Project::
Data Extraction from web page then parametric calculation.
SAP automation.
Email Automation.
Major Challenges::
Reading and manipulating the currency type values in the Excel.
Clicking on the specific cell of a table in an Application(Thats based on parameters).
Various other Excel Manipulations.
Changing Excel File names in A folder
ETC. ETC.
Things I learned::
How to do various types of excel manipulations.
Selector using dynamic value.
How to perfectly identify any element on a browser page using index.
I was surprised that one of the major challenges was not SAP Scripting being enabled. I hope the businesses IT company is welcoming to RPA @AryanSingh
I am very happy it worked out for you!
Quick question @ppr . When you set up the email account, did you use a personal email for that bot or use a resource account with multiple users. I have been trying to feel out which is the best practice. If we have a bot that is only looking at its own email, it helps with auditors and explaining the process that is, in a way, completely on its own environment and can be viewed as such. On the other hand, we also have bots looking into resource accounts that other users can use. This helps with sustainment initiatives because if for some reason the bot goes down, the users can still complete the process without any changes of instructions to the initiator team.
I would be interested in your opinion on the topic the choices between a bot email vs a resource account for multiple users. I would also like to know your opinion @SaiKrishna147 . It seems your robot used email too.
I find this as the best practice for companies right now in the RPA world @Shubham_Varshney . I wince when I hear companies “saving” money by cutting heads instead of giving different work to employees who work with robots. In the end, if a company decides to cut heads, the RPA team will have a difficult time, especially the Business Analysts in future projects. The RPA team will start to look like the grim reapers.
HR is one of the best places to start in RPA @Lahiru.Fernando ! Once they realize that robot is not going to “Go Rogue” with user data, they love it! Working with HR has taught me that Data Integrity audits are important, especially for personal information within the company. I am glad to hear you had a very successful project after an awesome training plan. Congrats on getting first place!
Super happy to hear you connected the robot to a SQL database @chenderson . We almost always use this as a best practice! SQL databases bring so much data integrity to the process. Sustainment issues with them are minimal!
@Electric_Sheep as far I recalled no lay-off were done cause of the RPA implementation,
They were simply re-assigned to a new process of finance… The task which was RPA’ed was headache to them as well, as manually downloading 100 reports and clubbing them was a real pain for them as well
I hope we don’t become the grim reaper… But I always say changes are always a stepping stone to becoming better
My first project is an in-house project for the marketing team in my company. It based on LinkedIn data scraping. So, I was searching for the companies based on the keyword provided in the config file and then extracting the company name and their headquarter and after the extracting is done, bot filter data according to on based on headquarter located in “IL” or “Illinois”. And then mailing the final report file to the concerned team.
Benefits:
This process used to takes almost a day if processed manually for one keyword, but through it cut down to around 2 hours.
LinkedIn had made their website dynamic so that no bot like RPA can able to extract the exact data from the website. It was a bit challenging for me to extract the data from such website.
In the end, I have learned a lot from my first project and it also helps me in upgrading my skills in RPA which will be helpful for me in my upcoming future projects.
@Electric_Sheep
it is always project / company / compliance regulated specific. We do this catch within the requirement phase and then designing the so called RobotID. The RobotID stands for all these questions how independent is a Robot and how much Collaboration is allowed. Herefore it is important to differentiate attended, unattended mode. Short spoken: It is not so far from comapairing this to real life - “Who is doing my work when I am on holiday”. You were asking about Best practice: the major principle that always is apllied is about the differentiation - it is a robot. Thinking here on AD Groups, GPOs, Admin Levels, 3rd System Permissions.
Once all this is brought into the picture, then the answers to e.g. single email box, shared group folders can be formal derived. The reason why it is so important is e.g Security and control (You mentioned above audits). And here RobotID and topics e.g. Identity stealing is very close coupled.
Let me know if you want me to elaborate more on this topic. In this case I would suggested to think about on how we develop a format to bring those topics in general into the forum.
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