Robotic Process Automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology governed by business logic and structured inputs that automates tasks or activities within business processes. An organization can use RPA to create software, or "robots," that gather and update data in other business software applications. Software robots typically automate highly repeatable, highly structured tasks across business software systems, such as processing transactions, manipulating data, triggering actions, and communicating with other systems. Unattended robots automate any business process that is definable, repeatable, and rules-based and do not require human interaction. Attended robots automate activities such as form completion, data transfer among systems, and other activities performed by users on their computers.
RPA use cases can range from the generation of an automatic reply to an email to the deployment of hundreds of robots that automate jobs in other systems. Since robots are low cost and easy to create, RPA can reduce staffing costs and human error within your organization. As a business practice, RPA discovers use cases for automation within business processes, and manages change to configuration and task assignments on an ongoing basis.
The product you use for RPA is webMethods Robotic Process Automation. It includes these components:
RPA Studio is a tool you use to design automation processes for your business procedures, with one-click process recording across any application and an easy-to-use drag and drop interface. This tool enables you to create and manage automation content for RPA Robots. Automation wizards record user actions as automated sequences of tasks that are saved in templates. The templates are accessed by end users who run them on their own computers (attended automation) or by robots who run them on virtual machines (unattended automation).
RPA Console is a web-based management and monitoring dashboard that enables you to remotely create, configure, schedule, trigger, and manage, and monitor robots.
RPA Web Service API enables external applications to invoke/monitor the RPA tasks of the RPA solution. It uses the ASP.NET MVC (Web API) model with methods to create tasks in task queues (POST) and retrieve task status (GET).
RPA Application Server manages security and access to automation processes for all components, manages task queues to use the automation workforce in the most efficient manner, processes incoming requests, and returns responses to the calling applications.