A Beginners Journey into RPA

Background

Last Christmas I found myself with a few spare days on my hands. I had a choice; spend it with family or do something I enjoy. I had skim read a lot of articles on Robotic Process Automation, or RPA for short and decided this was a skill I needed in my life. Armed with ideas of replacing family members with robots I fired up my laptop. Ten minutes of Windows updates later and I was good to go…weekends would never be the same again!

I’ve discussed RPA with friends and colleagues, sometimes friendly colleagues. They seem interested, or at least humoured my well-meaning technology rant. So, if the following short series of blogs are anyone’s fault, it’s theirs. As dedications go, I don’t think you can get much better.

A quick disclaimer – the information and experience has been gained through online study and experimentation. Do your own research, make your own mistakes and learn from them. I’m nobody’s fall guy.

What is RPA?

If you believe the marketing departments for the various RPA software providers, then Robots are here to steal all our jobs. This as you’ll be surprised to learn, is not really the case at all. In the world of RPA, the ‘Robot’ in Robotic Process Automation is not a cute little robot akin to Twiki in Buck Rogers (ask someone in their 50s), it’s just a computer program. It’s code. RPA software suppliers produce videos well-designed cute little robots working away – they always point out that robots need no sleep, don’t take holidays and don’t get drunk at the Christmas party and try and get off with the pretty girl in Accounts (ok I made the last one up), but it’s all nonsense. It’s just a code, a computer program with a fancy name designed to entice those looking for cost and time saving efficiencies in these difficult times. Does it save money? More on that next time.

So, to answer the original question – what is RPA? - It’s a computer program. Simples.

What does RPA do and why would I care?

Now this is where things start to get more interesting. RPA automates repetitive, often boring tasks that your typical employee hates, it’s not just work related though, there are plenty of personal projects waiting to be automated. In the next instalment I will go into detail about how RPA helped me with my addiction to Rightmove.

To quote Microsoft:

Take care of what’s important. Automate the rest.

So, you’re half a page in and you’re none the wiser. Ok, RPA replicates what you do over and over again. It does this by replicating what you do. How does it know this? You can either set the screen recorder to record and then it works out how to replicate what you’ve done, or you can create a flow chart and create a process for it to follow. Either way you will end up with a flowchart with the step-by-step actions to take you through every button click, every date entry and every email you need to send.

A business example might be that once a week you run a series of reports based on the previous weeks’ performance. You will need to enter some criteria for the report to run, and depending on the results an email needs to be sent to a specific group of people with an executive summary outlining whether it had been a good or bad week. This sort of repetitive task is made for RPA.

On a personal level, you’re looking for a property. You have signed up with the 3 main property portals but searching takes time and you’re becoming obsessed. Enter your criteria into your robot and it can search across the 3 portals and output the results into a spreadsheet with property details broken down into number of bedrooms, bathrooms, area and cost. It goes without saying your robot would remove duplicates and email a copy to whoever it was in your life that told you that you needed more space or that you couldn’t live in a minimalist bachelor pad all your life.

I believe this technology opens up a whole world of options both in your personal and professional lives.

What First?

I enrolled on a course on the training platform Udemy. For the uninitiated, Udemy has courses on everything from sewing and photography, to Photoshop, people skills and of course robotic process automation. Never pay full price, they have 50% off sales every other day. I spent ￡20 of my Christmas money (thanks Mum) on a course, which lasted around 8 hours. As it was a follow along course with practical projects and tests, the time it took to complete was probably double that. Before signing up and spending my hard-earned cash, or at least my mothers, I did some research on which software package was the best for me (i.e. easiest and quickest to learn). Obvious first step was to Google ‘RPA software’. This took me down a rabbit hole, so to save you 3 hours I’ll summarise. UiPath is the market leader, however expensive if you intend on having a lot of ‘robots’ running 24x7, Blue Prism isn’t far behind and has similar functionality, Automation 360 is also good but who every buys 3rd best? Microsoft, through acquisition, have thrown their hat in with the rest. ?At the moment I would only suggest you use their Power Automate product if you are someone who likes a bit of pain in your life - I’m not judging. Microsoft are investing heavily, but power Automate is currently a long way behind the others in terms of ease of use and functionality. In time I can see it becoming a better product, especially as they are pushing it with their Power Apps and linking it to Teams which we all use.

Low Code/No Code

Following the Ronseal school of marketing, Low Code/No Code does what it says on the tin. RPA utilises Low Code/No Code technology. Now what does this mean in the real world? If the marketeers are to be believed then anyone with keyboard skills can create a robot and take over the world, or at least Denmark. The reality is a little different. UiPath is low code. This means most of what you need to do is drag and drop then you fill in some additional information. For example, if you want to open a browser, simply go to the search box that lists all the commands you have available and type ‘open browser’. Similarly, if you need to get the mouse to click an OK button then type ‘Click’, need a double click? – type ‘double click’, want to type into a box or field, enter ‘type into’ – getting the idea? There are hundreds of out of the box commands, plus several thousand other commands bespoke to specific software.

I chose UiPath due to its simple interface and the wealth of online learning and help resources. If I got stuck, then I would either Google or search on YouTube until I found the answer.

Hello World

As is tradition in the strange little word of IT that I inhabit, my first project involved writing ‘Hello World!’ on the screen.

The basics of how I created my first robot in UiPath are simple:

1.???Create a flowchart outlining what I wanted to do

2.???Ignore flowchart and try and create some magic without a clearly defined process

3.???Go back to option 1, cursing the lost hours that have resulted from pursuing option 2

Here’s how I created the ‘Hello World’ moment

• Opened up UiPath and selected New
• Search for the word ‘message’ from the list of commands as I wanted to put a message on the screen, and select Message Box
• Enter “Hello World” in quotes
• Click run
• Marvel at the result, take screenshot, post online and await praise.

Having shown my family the results of my hard work and been met with a distinct lack of interest it was clear I would have to replace them with robots. Back to Udemy…