One of the growing areas to help with Legacy Integration and automation of integration is the use of automation tools and frameworks. Over the last 3 years, a significant emphasis on the automation of workflows with legacy and new cloud-aware applications for information workers has emerged. These tools sets are called Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

What RPAs are NOT

• 
  
• A method to control and manage Robots
• Process automation for factory machines
• A way of replacing workers

What RPAs are

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• A way of automating Information Workers redundant tasks
• A set of tools that records how Users interact with applications and plays it back
• A way to decrease errors in highly repetitive, user interface intensive Tasks

Current Market Place – 2019

• UiPath - $1 Billion investment on $300 Million in Annual Revenue
• Automation Anywhere - $500 Million investment on $100 Million in Annual Revenue
• BluePrism - $50 Million investment on $30 Million in Annual Revenue

Place where RPA works well

• Financial Institutions
• Medical Field
• Insurance
• Any place where lots of Information Workers do highly repetitive manual tasks
• Understand your Information Worker
• 
  

RPA Modes of Operation

Attended

·         Handles tasks for individual employees

·         Employees trigger and direct a bot to carry out an activity

·         Employees trigger bots to automate tasks as needed at any time

·         Increases productivity and customer satisfaction at call centers and other service desk environments

Unattended

·         Automates back-office processes at scale

·         Provisioned based on rules-based processes

·         Bots complete business processes without human intervention per a predetermined schedule

·         Frees employees from rote work, lowering costs, improving compliance, and accelerating processes

How to integrate RPA in your Enterprise

• Information Worker – This is the primary user of the RPA tools. Their manual processes are targets for automation.
• Application Developer – RPA bots change when applications are updated or created. Changes to User Interface require “re-recording” the RPA bots.
• IT Operations – Manage the RPA tools and deploy unattended RPA bots.

Managing Change

• Decrease number of updates to applications and user interfaces
• Decrease number of steps if possible.
• Decrease the number of tools integrated together.

Managing Security

• Find a tool that allows for the injection of security credentials into the RPA bot
• Look at auth keys instead of username and passwords

Managing RPA tools and bots with SecDevOps Workflows

RPA Bundling

SecDevOps Pipelining

Pitfalls of RPA bots

• Security can be a gaping hole if you don’t pay attention to it. One of the biggest mistakes is running applications in an RPA bot in privileged mode or with a “global” account credentials.
•  RPAs bots tightly couple to User Interfaces of multiple applications, any small change to an application means you need to re-record the RPA bot.
• RPA bots cannot hand change very well they are very brittle to change in applications and even configuration of applications.
•  Reuse is minimal due to the tight coupling with the application user interfaces. Some tools use tags instead of the absolute position of cursor and clicks.
• Some User Interfaces do not allow themselves to RPAs because they are dynamic. Which means they are hard to record.

Tips and Tricks

·         Treat RPAs as Complex Services running in your Multi-Hybrid Cloud

·         Run you RPA bots through SecDevOps Workflows like other applications.

·         Inject Security and Auth at runtime into the RPA tool.

·         Find ways to reuse RPA bots in different parts of your organization.

·         Have a plan to replace your RPA bot with a simplified integration

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