RPA

Creating your first UI Flow

Marky Roden Power Automate, RPA, UI Flows , , ,

In this article we will look how to simply copy data from a cell in excel into a word document. It is short an simple, but nicely highlights the concept and the ability to automate moving data from one place to another.

Introduction
Robot Process Automation (RPA) and Microsoft’s new UI Flow capability are allowing Microsoft 365 users to automate processes which were previously though to be out of reach.

To create UI Flows you must have access to Microsoft 365 and a Power Automate license. If you don’t then you can always sign up for the free Office 365 developer account and you can have your own me.sharepoint.com tenant allocated for learning and exploration.

Installing Power Automate Desktop
From within Power Automate you can find the UI Flows under the New icon at the top

Select Power Automate Desktop

Select a name and Launch App – If you do not have it installed you will be prompted to download and install it

A simple test excel sheet
I created an excel file locally and left a simple message inside the message is in cell d4. The file is located at C:\Users\mroden\Desktop\temp\RPATest\RPATest.xslx

Power Automate Desktop
Back in the desktop tool I am going to start to build the robot. There are many different ways to achieve the same thing. being efficient is one thing that is important for robots, but that’s for another day. These are the steps we want to automate the moving of text in an excel cell to a word document.

  • Open the Excel file
  • Get the current Sheet
  • Go to Cell D4
  • Copy the Cell
  • Open Word
  • Execute a Paste.

So let’s start. Within Power Automate Desktop we are able to find the open to “Launch Excel” and from the resulting dialog select the path to the excel file we want to open.

We then add steps to Read from Excel worksheet – selecting and copying cell D4.

NOTE – the variable produced is “ExcelData” we will use this later once word is opened.

We are going to be good robot writers and now close the excel sheet again so that we don’t leave copies of excel all over the place.

Next we will open word and paste the ExcelData variable into the new book. We will do this by running a program and opening a test word document (blank) file – RPATest.docx.

Once open we then have to click into the window to make it active.

We do this using a Click UI action. We have to have the word document first open so that we can direct the Desktop app to pick where to click.

We select to add a new UI element and then the mouse highlights different aspects of the applications open. We mouse over the Word document and select CTRL-Click to record

The final step is to then send the text of the copied Excel cell back to the Word document. We can do this using SendKeys, and then selecting the ExcelData variable to be sent.

The final bot is finished and while it is simple it demonstrates how we can integrate multiple applications without having to write any code.

Running the robot…..we get this…. 🙂 You will see from the video that the variables are being stored and shown on the screen.

Conclusion
In this article we have seen how to install Power Automate Desktop and create out first simple bot. It’s takes a little time to get used to the interface but is pretty simple and worth having a go at yourself.

NOTE – This article is written in October 2020 and the content is likely to change over time as the platform evolves. It is written to help people wanting to get started with the preview version of Power Automate Desktop

Power Automate – UI flows

Marky Roden Just Marky , ,

Power Automate acts like the glue holding together the interconnected web of Microsoft 365 and the broader partner eco-system. With the ability to trigger a “Flow” from hundreds of events on the platform, to perform thousands of potential actions, Power Automate is a compelling investment for companies looking seriously at no/low-code application integration.

Microsoft have extended Power Automate beyond the platform and onto the desktop with the addition of the UI Flows capability. Robot Process Automation (RPA) is the new kid on the block for companies trying to squeeze even more automation and productivity out of what’s left of their business processes.

For companies who are automating their business processes on the Microsoft 365 platform, adding RPA to the mix makes a lot of sense. Automating modern API based platforms to work together has been the theme of cloud platform delivery for years now. But it has never been able to achieve full integration with the manual repetitive processes which can consume many companies.

UI Flows are only in preview, but already Microsoft has released a significant capability for building Robots, the Power Automate Desktop. Using this tool anyone can start to build automation into their daily business processes.

My hope it to be able to start to write about Power Automate Desktop, learn about it’s features and create some compelling examples for our customers so that when it is finally released we will be able to provide the quality consulting that I know our customers have come to love about working with PSC………

Robot Process Automation

Marky Roden Just Marky

Robot Process Automation (RPA) as a technology group enables the automation of repetitive manual human tasks.

Imagine how much easier Excel Macros make an accounting process whereby a multi-stage process can be automated with the push of a button. Now imagine a multi-stage process where a human has to take data from Excel, or worse a paper document, and move it to another application such as a web site. RPA can do that for you.

– RPA can do that –

In an idea world where every system has a beautifully architected API integration layer, every system would be able to easily and quickly talk to every other system. In reality this is far from the case and a sleek and effective integration is either impossible or prohibitively expensive. RPA can do that for you.

Examples
Many companies have to go through a process of converting paper based data to electronic format. Whether it is incoming invoices, logistics documentation or even waste disposal profiles, there are thousands of people who’s role is to type data from paper into a website.

Through a relatively simple process of connecting the dots, a Robot can be configured to be responsible for:

  • Collecting the data from an Automated OCR process
  • Open a web browser and log into the ERP system
  • Map the data from the form to fields on a web form
  • Submit the web form

Reducing Risk
RPA Robots aren’t error prone. Robots will do exactly what is expected of them. In an business, mistakes cost money and in especially heavily regulated environments the consequences of putting the wrong value in fields can be significant.

Increasing productivity for everyone
Robots are also quicker than people, reducing the time taken for process completion. This then also frees up the people to be able to work in other areas of a business and bring their experience to bear in other ways.

There are many vendors in the RPA space, and Microsoft has entered the foray by extending their Microsoft 365 Power Automate platform to include UI-Flows. https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/ui-flows/ I am going to write about Power Automate and ui-flows specifically as I believe it will be a significant game changer for our client in the future.

PSC Labs 2018 review

Marky Roden Just Marky , , , , , , , , ,

PSC Labs was founded in 2015 to provide unbiased, vendor-agnostic technology insights. Our mission is to ensure client
delivery excellence and new solution offerings through the adoption of emerging technologies.

For more information check us out at https://labs.psclistens.com

2018 review

PSC Labs undertook a wide-variety of projects in 2018. From Robot Process Automation to Event Driven Architecture seven projects were undertaken to improve our understanding of these technologies/capabilities.

Blockchain

The team looked into how Blockchain worked and then on a more practical level looked specifically into Ethereum and the ability to incorporate Smart Contracts into the chain. We looked at the services provided by various cloud vendors and found that at the time, the examples for implementations were on a very large scale.

Blockchain is not difficult to understand technically, but the broad questions about scalability, long term viability and adoption though are still quite open ended.

Custom Vision API

The team looked at the newly released Azure Cognitive Services Image process capabilities and built a custom app capable of recognizing every day images. The application built on top of a Xamarin iOS mobile app provides a user with the ability to take a number of pictures of an object, from different angles, and store them within the application.

The Azure Cognitive Services are used to generate a Machine Learning model which can then be downloaded back to the device. The application is then capable of using the camera to identify objects with a predicted level of accuracy.

Grouping Models Training The Model Running Locally

The investigation team successfully demonstrated the ability to build a real-world application around the Azure Cognitive Service.

Azure/AWS IoT

The team investigated the IoT services available in Azure and AWS. To build on the previous work the Labs had done with GE’s Predix platform, these investigation teams were focused on using the available abstraction services from the cloud vendors and not on the low level device/data interaction.

We discovered that both platforms were very good at easily setting up the ability to handle data ingestion from devices. The ease of setup on the device to allow for secure authenticated transmission of data was simple and easy to understand in both cases.

The Azure platform service stood out however with their Azure IoT Suite and Remote Monitoring. Once the data ingestion was set up, the IoT Suite enabled us to create a monitoring dashboard and set controls for performance monitoring. The ability to configure limits for data and automate notifications based on those limits promise considerable potential.

The Azure IoT Suite highlighted how far IoT as a service has come in a short period of time and is a viable solution to any company seeking to set up and start to take advantage of the burgeoning IoT landscape.

Fly.io

The investigation team looked at the intriguing concept of a programmable CDN and the promise of being able to enhance website performance without having to change any of the code on the site directly. An example of this capability would be the adding of a watermark to an image. The Fly.io server would proxy in between the image server and programmatically add the watermark. The watermarked version of the image would then be cached for the next user, at the CDN closer to the user than the original image on the server.

The fly.io Edge Application runtime is an open core Javascript environment built for proxy servers. It gives developers powerful caching, content modification, and routing tools.

The runtime is based on V8, with a proxy-appropriate set of Javascript libraries. There are built in APIs for manipulating HTML and Image content, low level caching, and HTTP requests/responses. When possible, we use WhatWG standards (like fetch, Request, Response, Cache, ReadableStream).

The team found that the implementation of Fly.io as a developer was not complex and the examples provided were easy to set up and run. But overall the team found that this capability feels more like a solution waiting for a problem.

Event Driven Architecture

Kafka

At the start of 2018, as part of their 10 technologies to watch Gartner declared “Event Driven Architectures” as something to pay attention to. The Labs team looked into Kafka specifically although there are others (Azure Event Hub being one) with this in mind. Kafka was originally a project created by LinkedIn to handle their massive data volume and was subsequently open sourced through the Apache foundation.

The team created a demo application which ingested data from an HR application managing people and their records. From the input of the data multiple complex processes were initiated and executed by the event driven architecture. The response of the application, even running locally was very impressive.

Robot Process Automation

UIPath

While Robot Process Automation (RPA) is not a new technology, it’s coming to the forefront of business rapidly. With VC funding for major RPA vendors more prevalent (AutomationAnywhere, UIPath), it demonstrates the capacity for the market to absorb this new technology quickly.

RPA as an industry is all about the automation of repetitive mundane tasks, such as manual data entry into multiple systems. Many companies have long established manual business processes, mainly due to the cost to automate the process. RPA can help address this problem by accurately and repeatedly following the same steps a person would.

We looked at UIPath as a vendor for RPA and looked into the more advanced capabilities of the platform. We created an ability for a code check-in process within AzureDevOps, to trigger a build process chain and instruct the RPA robot to automate a UI test through a browser. If the robot found a failure it created a bug within AzureDevOps related to the failing test.

RPA is mature and already being used across many industries, there is significant opportunity for cost effective savings for companies to use RPA.

GraphQL

GraphQL is a technology created by Facebook in response to a problem they found themselves when facing a growth model based on a service-based architecture. As Facebook pages grew in complexity and functionality, the number of services being called increased and caused various performance issues. The PSC labs team set up to investigate whether or not GraphQL would be applicable to the projects we were planning to work on in the future.

The investigation team took an existing mobile application where the load time was in excess of 10 seconds and was able, using GraphQL, to reduce the load time of the page by over 50%. In a case where the user was on a mobile network with high latency the loading speed was increased by over 65%.

GraphQL has many advantages for a developer and project team when considering a services architecture, from the creation of a standard endpoint, to the reduction in network calls and speed of time to page load, it proved itself very valuable.

 

Conclusion

PSC Labs had another successful year investigating many broad technology innovations. As in previous years, some of the projects show great promise and we will be working on new iterations of them in 2019.

If you want to find out more about PSC Labs and/or have an interesting project you would like us to share with you please contact

info@psclistens.com for more information