Robotic Process Automation Projects

Build real-world RPA solutions using UiPath and Automation Anywhere

Nandan Mullakara, Arun Kumar Asokan

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781839217357
• eBook ISBN: 9781839210952
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Computer Science

Learn RPA by building business solutions such as ERP and CRM automation, software robots, and intelligent process automation from scratch

Key Features

• Use popular RPA tools Automation Anywhere A2019 and UiPath, for real-world task automation
• Build automation solutions for domains such as System Administration, Finance, HR, Supply Chain, and Customer Relations
• Extend your RPA capabilities by implementing Intelligent process automation with APIs and AI

Book Description

Robotic Process automation helps businesses to automate monotonous tasks that can be performed by machines.

This project-based guide will help you progress through easy to more advanced RPA projects. You'll learn the principles of RPA and how to architect solutions to meet the demands of business automation, along with exploring the most popular RPA tools - UiPath and Automation Anywhere. In the first part, you'll learn how to use UiPath by building a simple helpdesk ticket system. You'll then automate CRM systems by integrating Excel data with UiPath. After this, the book will guide you through building an AI-based social media moderator using Google Cloud Vision API. In the second part, you'll learn about Automation Anywhere's latest Cloud RPA platform (A2019) by creating projects such as an automated ERP administration system, an AI bot for order and invoice processing, and an automated emergency notification system for employees. Later, you'll get hands-on with advanced RPA tasks such as invoking APIs, before covering complex concepts such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in automation to take your understanding of RPA to the next level.

By the end of the book, you'll have a solid foundation in RPA with experience in building real-world projects.

What you will learn

• Explore RPA principles, techniques, and tools using an example-driven approach
• Understand the basics of UiPath by building a helpdesk ticket generation system
• Automate read and write operations from Excel in a CRM system using UiPath
• Build an AI-based social media moderator platform using Google Cloud Vision API with UiPath
• Explore how to use Automation Anywhere by building a simple sales order processing system
• Build an automated employee emergency reporting system using Automation Anywhere
• Test your knowledge of building an automated workflow through fun exercises

Who this book is for

This RPA book is for enterprise application developers, software developers, business analysts, or any professional who wants to implement RPA across various domains of the business. The book assumes some understanding of enterprise systems. Computer programming experience will also be beneficial.

Moderating Social Media Using AI

So far, we've covered a few projects by completing basic UiPath activities such as web automation and Excel automation. In this chapter, we will cover further ground by invoking libraries from the UiPath marketplace, UiPath Go!, and creating our first artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation!

We will learn how to automatically moderate images that are uploaded to social media sites. This type of automation will process images using the Google Cloud Vision API and send the administrator a spreadsheet with its recommendations.

This project will help you understand the following:

• The basics of the Google Cloud Vision API using the Detect Explicit content or SafeSearch feature
• Using the UiPath Go! marketplace
• Using configuration files to avoid hardcoding
• UiPath Excel operations
• Using advanced Try-Catch blocks to handle exceptions in individual sequences

Technical requirements

You will need the following hardware and software to complete this project:

• A PC with UiPath Community Edition version 19+ installed.
• UiPath Go! registration. Go to https://go.uipath.com to sign up.

• Microsoft Excel 2007 or later.
• The Google Cloud Vision API. This allows developers to easily integrate vision detection features within applications, including image labeling, face and landmark detection, optical character recognition (OCR), and explicitly tagging content. More information can be found at https://cloud.google.com/vision/.
• Check out the following video to see the Code in Action: https://bit.ly/2ZpArim.

The code for this chapter can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Robotic-Process-automation-Projects/tree/master/SocialMediaSafeSearch. Please follow it throughout.

Project overview

In this project, we will use the image recognition cloud service (SafeSearch in the Google Cloud Vision API) to detect whether any images being uploaded to a website contains any explicit content.

The administrators of social media sites have scripts running, as per a pre-defined schedule, to check any new images that are uploaded. If there are new uploads, the script copies those images to another folder for the bot to process. The administrator does not want the bot to be working directly on the social media website folder.

Once the bot detects that new files have been uploaded, it reads each file and creates an Excel log to pass to the administrator. It then loops through all the image entries in the spreadsheet and invokes SafeSearch in the Google Cloud Vision API to check the images. The API returns an output that indicates whether the image contains adult, medical, violent, or racy content. We add this output to Excel and send this to the administrator for him/her to take the appropriate action.

In this chapter, we will be building out the automation process performed by the bot. Here is a high-level workflow for the project:

The SafeSearch API is an alias of Detect Explicit Content in the Google Cloud Vision API and might be used interchangeably in this chapter.

Now, let's look at the technical details for this project.

Project detail

In this section, we'll look at the overall flow for this project in terms of the UiPath project components we will be building and their interaction.

We will have a main workflow called Main.xaml that will invoke other workflows and orchestrate the automation. From this workflow, we will invoke the ReadConfig.xaml file to read the configuration parameters – the input and output file paths and Google Authentication.

The reason we have a configuration file is to avoid hardcoding values in the automation process. This also gives users the option to update the parameters without making any code changes.

With the configuration parameters, we will invoke the BuildExcelList.xaml file in order to read the images placed in the Input folder and create a list of images that we'd like to pass to the Google Vision SafeSearch API. We will create this image list, which includes the image's filename, and their path, which will be placed in another Excel file called ImageDetails.xlsx.

Next, we will retrieve the Google API's credentials and pass those along with the Excel file we built to SafeSearch.xaml. Within this SafeSearch workflow, we will loop through and invoke the Google Vision SafeSearch API for each image in the list. The SafeSearch Google Vision API returns the likelihood of the images being adult, medical, violent, or racy. This is populated in the ImageDetails.xlsx Excel file and placed in the Output folder for the administrator to review and moderate. Here is the sequence diagram for this automation process:

Now, let's start stepping through each of the workflows in detail, starting with the main workflow.

Getting started with the project

As with any UiPath project, we will start by opening UiPath Studio and creating a new project. Perform the following steps:

1. Open UiPath Studio and choose the New Blank Process option on the initial screen.
2. In the main workflow, let's start by adding a sequence called Main Sequence.
3. Next, we'll add a Try-Catch block to manage exceptions.
4. Withi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• Contributors
• About Packt
• Preface
• Getting Started with Robotic Process Automation
• Help Desk Ticket Generation
• CRM Automation
• Moderating Social Media Using AI
• Purchase Order Processing with UiPath ReFramework
• Completing an RPA Challenge
• Sales Order Processing
• ERP User Administration
• Employee Emergency Notifications
• Using AI and RPA for Invoice Processing
• Appendix A and B for UiPath
• Appendix: Looking Forward and Next Steps
• Other Books You May Enjoy