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)

Control Room and Work Queues

One of the biggest drivers of deploying a robotic process into the workforce is to eliminate or at least minimize the need for human intervention. So far, each time we ran the process, we had to click on the Play button—that is an action that still requires a human. For the processes to be fully automated, robots should run them on their own, using a scheduler. In Blue Prism, all that action takes place in the control room. In this chapter, we will do the following:

  • Explore the control room
  • See how we can use the control room to get the robot to run on its own

The control room is also used for managing work queues. You could have a list of items in the work queue and a team of robots working on them at the same time. In this way, just like humans, it is possible for robots to work as a team.

We will learn how to do the following:

  • Create a...