Vaibhav Srivastava - Getting started with RPA using Automation Anywhere: Automate your day-to-day Business Processes using Automation Anywhere

Sushil, Amita, Shubhangi, Rankita, and Shooleen Srivastava

My family, which has been always my support system.

Vaibhav is a Software Delivery Manager, with 11 years of experience in which he has implemented multiple assignments with varying roles like architect, business analyst, solution consultant, and instructor for various technologies like RPA, data science, machine learning, and .NET.

Some of the organizations that Vaibhav has been associated with are ContactPoint360, IBM, HPE, KPMG, Novartis, Unisys, TCL, HCL Technologies, Ryan India, and NSEIT to name a few.

In 2017, Vaibhav moved into RPA and started his journey with Automation Anywhere. The journey has been a cherished one and has taken him on multiple unexplored areas. After Automation Anywhere, Vaibhav also developed expertise in UiPath, another market-leading RPA tool, and later upgraded tech stack with gaining knowledge about machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence.

Outside work, Vaibhav volunteers his spare time in helping, coaching, and mentoring young people in taking up careers in technology.

There are a few people I want to thank for the continued and ongoing support they have given me during the writing of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank my family and daughter, Shooleen, for putting up with me while I was spending many weekends and evenings on writingI could have never completed this book without their support.

Finally, I would like to thank BPB Publications for giving me this opportunity to write my first book for them.

Robotic process automation is a software development environment using which one can create robots that mimic human actions on different business applications (CRMs, ERPs, help desk, and claim applications).

According to the Institute of Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence (IRPAAI), RPA is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure a computer software or a robot to capture and interpret the existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems.

Robotics refers to the software robots, and robotics ascribes to the physical or humanoid robots.

RPA is the base level or stepping stone into the business process automation. The business processes that are automated using RPA are rule-based, repetitive, and mundane and work on the structured data. The process cannot have a touchpoint that requires the use of human intelligence or requires the bot to make judgement calls.

Automation using cognitive capabilities is the second level of business process automation. Cognitive Automation is like teaching a child. While creating cognitive automation, we train the bot to identify and learn different variations in the process. The processes that should be automated where there are variations in business rules and the variations are in the limit that those can be trained to a robot. Cognitive Automation is created by using machine learning.

Automation using artificial intelligence is the third level of automation. Automation created using AI is very similar to a human doing a process that involves a high level of human intelligence and judgement calls. The processes primed for AI Automation can be preparing legal arguments for a court case studying previous judgements or providing the most suitable medicine based on the symptoms to doctors.

The primary goal of this book is to provide the information and skills that are necessary to develop and deploy bots created in Automation Anywhere environment. This book contains real-life case studies and their practical implementation that will show you how to develop, deploy, and schedule bots as well as create secure the credential variables and workflow. Over the 14 chapters in this book, you will learn the following:

discusses business process automation, its advantages, and the stages of business process automation, namely, RPA, cognitive automation, and augmented artificial intelligence.

discusses robotic process automation, how it is different from traditional automation, a checklist for selecting RPA tool, and RPA tools in market and their use cases.

discusses the architecture of Automation Anywhere Enterprise application and its components, namely, Bot Creator, Web Control Room and Bot Runner.

is about the client application, which is the interface for Bot Creator and Bot Runner and the functionality and options available to each of the role.

is a key chapter that discusses, in-depth, about variables and mainly user variables and its types which are value, list, array, random, and dictionary. It also provides step-by-step practical exercises that help you understand how and when to use each of the variable types.