Approaches to build a better RPA solution
Robotic Process Automation or RPA is being used by a lot of organizations these days to automate their day-to-day repetitive tasks which were previously done by humans. The rate of adopting RPA by any organization has shown significant growth over the last few years. There are various RPA tools available in the market, that help organizations to design and build automation solutions. The primary purpose of RPA is to automate repetitive manual tasks. These solutions empower an organization with additional resources which can perform repetitive tasks more efficiently and much faster than humans.
Why is better design important?
RPA projects can be complex if the actual task is not well defined or if the actual process goes through a long pipeline involving lots of applications or has a lot of rules and conditions. The complexity of any RPA project depends on various factors which includes
- How well the process is defined: If any process is defined properly and all the steps to be automated are well understood then things become easier. Sometimes even longer processes with a lot of steps can be automated easily if the steps are well defined.
- If there is a lot of noise in the environment where any automation runs, the actual process flow will be hampered and things won’t work as expected a lot of exceptions will occur. Handling these exceptions will further increase the complexity.
Designing a proper RPA solution is an extremely crucial step before starting actual automation. A proper design must contain well-defined steps with all the conditions, scenarios and exceptions. If the design is proper then it not only helps in building a solution but also reduces the failure rate. Let’s dive deep into this topic more and understand what must be done before starting any RPA projects.
Steps to design a better solution
Understand the process: It is essential to first understand the process on a higher level. This is more about understanding the application(s) required for the process, duration of the process if it is done manually, business aspect, etc. In some cases, there can be a manual intervention required for certain steps which are also needed to be considered. Then each step can be reviewed in detail along with constraints, conditions, rules, special cases, exceptions and actions to be taken for those exceptions. This understanding is essential to assess the complexity of the automation process.
Flow diagram: After extracting the fine-grain details, one must look into creating some process flow diagram including the input source, output, exceptions, etc. to visually analyse the complexity of the process. One can include as much detail as possible. It collectively shows the entire process and how things are moving from start to end.
Handling errors: While mimicking humans, a bot might face several issues due to external noise (sudden pop-ups or notifications, not loading of the webpage, etc.). The number and frequency of such exceptional cases vary depending on the process. If any error is encountered then, if there are any pre-defined actions to be taken, then it becomes very easy to handle that error. Sometimes the handling of exceptions includes notifying end-users through an email or recording it in an activity log or generating an error log. These logs will be helpful during any manual check. There must be an action defined for frequent issues that can occur. Some exceptions can be extremely rare, such exceptions can be simply reported.
Managing the process: The whole manual process can be large, so, it is always better to chunk down the entire process into smaller subprocesses for better maintenance. Independent tasks can be chunked down as a separate subprocess. Sometimes there might be certain dependencies between these subprocesses. For example, let’s assume one sub-process is to download a file from some website and the second sub-process uses this file for formatting. So, there is some dependency. Another example: Let’s assume one sub-process is to scrape details from a website and the second sub-process needs this scrapped data for further processing. So, one needs to create a temporary file to keep the information extracted in the first sub-process which serves as an input for the second sub-process. Additional advantages of dividing any process into sub-process are easy debugging, reusability, easy management.
How LokiBots helps in design and error handling
Being a cloud-native platform that offers a subscription-based pricing model with pay-as-you-go, LokiBots can help customers to automate their business processes with zero Capex costs and minimal Opex. LokiBots provides a feature where a process can be automated in smaller chunks and later combined. Dividing the entire process into smaller chunks helps a user in many ways. First, if subprocesses are independent of each other so that the subprocesses can be automated in parallel and tested individually. Second, LokiBots offers a service known as Task store, where the subprocess can be automated by one person and uploaded into the task store so that, later if some other user or the same user wants to use this same task for another process, it can be used with some little editing as per user’s requirement. Third, if there are some changes to be done then these changes can be easily done without affecting the other subprocesses hence making it easy to manage the process.
LokiBots also handles exceptions in an efficient way. If handling any error is part of the automation process then it can be automated else errors are logged in an activity log known as audit logs where every action taken by the bot will be recorded along with errors and reasons for the error. Also, an email is triggered to the email ID provided by the user during signing up to the LokiBots account, stating the error and reason for the error.
What’s next
The next steps involve developing the bot as per the design and testing different scenarios along with exceptions. The process of development depends on the platform chosen. Some platforms offer a drag and drop approach, some platforms offer a step recording approach and some platforms offer both. Developing any bot in LokiBots is straightforward because it offers a smart recording option where any user, without much technical expertise, can easily record the steps he/she performs every day. Also, LokiBots provides an additional enhancement that allows users to include small python snippets for integrating backend third-party APIs easily. The API integrations and related details can be included during the designing phase.
Want to know more about LokiBots, and interested to start your RPA journey?
Reach out to us at Sales@LokiBots.com.
For more details, visit https://www.lokibots.ai/.
About the Author
Sourin Karmakar is working as an Automation and Machine learning engineer in LokiBots Inc. He is currently working on various automation use cases across various domains. He is currently involved in designing process flows, implementing them by leveraging AI/ML models, image processing and various other tools required for the process implementation.
