Top 3 Improvements

Feedback Orchestrator
1

Hi Team,

These are my top 3 improvements for the product:

  1. Improved Dashboards from Orchestrator - we need easy to create SQL queries, ideally not utilising third party software, this should allow tracking of cases, historic trends, time to process etc. I know there are some basic dashboards but they are not great. Kibana is fine for logging but I’m more interested in the Database - is it possible to point Kibana at the DB, if so that could be a nice solution as Kibana is a very pretty tool .

  2. Orchestrator should come as an installer package. All of the configuration options should be options within a GUI installer. Installing Orchestrator from Powershell is not a good option and it looks too disconnected from the Studio Package. I don’t think Studio and Orchestrator need to be combined into the same product (a la Blue Prism) but the installer for Orchestrator needs to be easier.

  3. The designer should be enhanced with some basic custom activities to improve the visual aspect. I think it should be pretty easy to add a couple of extra shapes which replicate the sequence and assign activities. These should be smaller and clickable to expand but at a high level should resemble a workflow map such as Visio or Adonis. The Sequence and Assign boxes are too big and they make a basic process look messy. I know you are restricted by WWF but I am sure you could create a couple of custom activities to replace these.

@andrew.rayner @andrzej.kniola @badita @aksh1yadav what do you think :wink:

Hope that helps.

RD

4 Likes
2
  1. It should be discussed separately. I think everything is achievable in Kibana with the right log fields in place.
  2. Addressed in 2017.1.
  3. Could you send a moqup? Sequence and Assign are Microsoft WF activities. We should implement our own.
1 Like
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#1 - I’m sure they have something in the store (hopefully), but I fully agree - Orchestrator dashboards as of today are only good for checking as-is situation and very high level data.
Some examples of useful data that is there, but cannot be shown:

  • Average transaction times (Success, AppFailure, BusinessRuleFailure) for set time periods. A bar graph (with hour/day/month granularity for consistency) would easily allow to see impact of changes in the process, as well as checking processing consistency across busier time slots (f.e. during business hours human workers are using the same systems, processing might be slower - by how much?).
  • Timeline for jobs (f.e. gantt of start/end times) - for better capacity planning

Sidenote - please add InProgress column to Queue views, it’s silly to see “Remaining = 0” when robots are working on last items.

#2 - It would be nice to have an installer, but I don’t think it’s a big deal TBH. Agreed that it’s better that they remain separate.

#3 - I don’t find it messy, maybe I’m just not seeing your perspective. Maybe a sketch could help to see the difference you have in mind?

For #2 and #3 I’d say Log search would be much higher in priority - currently it’s only possible to filter and sort, but logs without searching are mostly useless and one needs to go to Kibana (or that machine log file) for any type of actual log analysis.

4

Good ideea.

That’s difficult in SQL Server as it is not a good system for text search.

Like. This should be discussed in a separate topic. There is a view chart option per each queue but those charts may be improved.

5

Something that WorkFusion say they do (I don’t believe the hype!) is to track manual user times. This would be cool to implement as it would then directly demonstrate the benefit of automating the process compared with user cases. :slight_smile:

6

I know it’s difficult to achieve, just pointing out that without search, logs functionality is heavily limited.

They have a different process structure and human task is just another step in it, that way they can track it. For fully manual work there’s no data points.
But we’re digressing - send the moqups :wink: