What is UiPath: RPA in layman’s Term

1K Blog Marathon: Day 6

Do you want to have more free time while doing more task? Do you have repetitive jobs, which your hand is straining from the keyboard strokes that you do using muscle memory? Do you find yourself thinking of doing more productive and logical tasks and pass on the mundane ones?

Well I have good news for you! UiPath is here to save the day. UiPath is a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Tool which allows you to automate your processes, giving you more time to focus on the more important jobs. But in layman’s term, what is Robotic Process Automation?

Image Source: https://www.unilad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/term.jpg

What is RPA?

No, it’s not the physical robot with mechanical bodies. RPA is a piece of software (Bot) that will carry out simple to complex task independently. Imagine our use case scenarios:

You are tasked to open an email with the Subject “Daily Monitoring”.
You will download the attachment (an Excel file) and rename it like
“Daily Monitoring – sender –date”
Then you will compose an email with a fixed template message.
You will attach the downloaded file, and send it to the Documentation Department.

It’s easy right? But what if I tell you that you will do it for a nearly….

… 5 thousand emails? Can you do it?

This is where automation will intervene, where in you will only click a “Run” button, and it will do the task for you for 5 thousand times, with a 70% to 80% increase in speed of execution and 80% – 90% of increase in accuracy. With just one click. But that is “Attended Bot”. What if I told you there is an “Unattended Bot”, where you just have to schedule it, no Run button required?

Another scenario;

You are tasked to log-in to a website, highlight the table data, copy it and paste in a CSV file.
The twist is, it’s not only on one page – it’s a 70 page table with 100,000 items!

Again, using RPA, you can magically copy all of it with one action –

/*Drum rolls*/

Screen Scraping.

It is a process of copying (scraping) text. Along with “Data Scraping”, you have an option to copy the next 69 pages and copy it all at once in a big data table.

Final scenario;

You are given 1 thousand images – barcode images.
You should encode it in your System.

I think it’s a job for OCR and Image Automation! Using OCR, you will just set the Clipping Region, insert the image and the bot will get OCR text from the barcode images.

You see, Robotic Process Automation is far different from the automation we all knew. Our office processes, even though running on our computers, still needs human intervention – clicking, saving, typing, downloading. We can say that it’s only 50% to 60% automation. But by using RPA, we can on a full blown 100% automation.

And now, what is UiPath?

UiPath is a global software company that develops a platform for robotic process automation. (source: UiPath.com)

UiPath Studio is a developer’s platform to create, debug and run RPA. With UiPath Studio, you can automate your tasks: from web scraping, files, emails, applications and many more – anything you can do in a computer can be automated using UiPath!

It runs in a Dot Net environment, so the code is Visual Basic. It also offers C# language.

Upon deployment of bots, you can either run it from your computer via UiPath Studio, or run it remotely using Orchestrator. UiPath Orchestrator is a server-based robot dashboard where you can deploy, manage, assign, schedule, terminate and simply, automate your bots. More about in-depth Orchestrator will be coming soon in my blog.

UiPath also offers Certification! You just have to take the Foundation Training, then you can proceed to the RPA Developers Certification Exam. I already have two of it! (It expires every year, so you have to keep on taking the exam).

I have so much in store about this amazing “bot maker”, just hang on with my blogs for the next part!