Book Image

Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

By : Lim Mei Ying
Book Image

Robotic Process Automation with Blue Prism Quick Start Guide

By: Lim Mei Ying

Overview of this book

Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation where user-configured robots can emulate the actions of users. Blue Prism is a pioneer of robotic process automation software, and this book gives you a solid foundation to programming robots with Blue Prism. If you've been tasked with automating work processes, but don't know where to start, this is the book for you! You begin with the business case for robotic process automation, and then move to implementation techniques with the leading software for enterprise automation, Blue Prism. You will become familiar with the Blue Prism Studio by creating your first process. You will build upon this by adding pages, data items, blocks, collections, and loops. You will build more complex processes by learning about actions, decisions, choices, and calculations. You will move on to teach your robot to interact with applications such as Internet Explorer. This can be used for spying elements that identify what your robot needs to interact with on the screen. You will build the logic behind a business objects by using read, write, and wait stages. You will then enable your robot to read and write to Excel and CSV files. This will finally lead you to train your robot to read and send emails in Outlook. You will learn about the Control Room, where you will practice adding items to a queue, processing the items and updating the work status. Towards the end of this book you will also teach your robot to handle errors and deal with exceptions. The book concludes with tips and coding best practices for Blue Prism.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

The Case for Robotic Process Automation

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a clone? Someone to sit at your desk in the office to do all the tedious, mundane, and monotonous work? The reality of getting a robot to do tasks that were previously done by humans is now made possible by robotic process automation.

Robotic process automation is not a new concept. For years, people have been programming scripts to download data from websites, macros to automate spreadsheets, and recorders to record mouse-clicks. Whatever could be done by a computer could be fulfilled somehow or other in the hands of a highly skilled programmer. However, it is only recently where all these capabilities have been built into a product. And to top it off, the tools enable citizen developers to build their own processes without the technical complexity of writing oodles of code lines.

In this chapter, we will start at square one. We will take a look at what robotic process automation is all about and we will perform a quick study to pick out a process suited for RPA. The topics covered in this chapter are the following:

  • What is robotic process automation?
  • Finding a process suitable for automation
  • The process definition document