UiPath Steers Automation Closer To Business Processes – Forbes

Navigating the corridors of (digitally automated) business.

Automation accelerates. As a core fundamental truth that has pervaded through the three (some say four) industrial revolutions, every time we have succeeded in applying automation at one level or another, we have generally been able to execute some function or process at an accelerated rate.

Today we understand automation to exist not just in factory machines, industrial equipment engineering and pre-programmed devices; we also understand software automation to be the intelligence required to execute defined, specific repeatable tasks inside business processes and human workflow models.

But automation needs to be smart. As they say, garbage in - garbage out. Simply speeding up inefficient systems means we do more stuff badly, more quickly. Applying software automation in the form of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) that enables us to create autonomous self-running and even self-healing systems only happens effectively if we bring automation engineering close to an organizations tactical operations stream.

Now that we're past the basics and looking for more sophisticated levels of advancement in this space, enterprise automation software company UiPath has now explained how it is bringing more business-centricity to how its platform can be used by software developers. Put simply, UiPath has crated what it calls developer-friendly automation innovations that put the power of automation behind more business processes.

The UiPath Business Automation Platform provides the foundation every enterprise needs to develop new apps and automate existing ones. Whether the desired business outcome is acceleration of profitable growth, cost savings, or improved employee and customer experiences, UiPath makes it easy to transform more processes into digital, automated workflows, said Ted Kummert, executive vice president, products & engineering at UiPath.

Marketing-driven VP statements and corporate backslapping notwithstanding then, what is the company actually doing and how do these software tools actually work?

For developers, theres UiPath Studio Web, a browser-based automation development tool designed to automation creation available to cross-platform users and makes it easier to distribute automation at scale in an organization.

The important words there are of course cross-platform & at-scale.

In order to enable software automations to work more broadly cross-platform (i.e. core operating systems from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux, but also Apple iOS, Android and specialised platforms that might be deployed at the edge in the Internet of Things), UiPath will have had to shoulder some meaty background engineering to serve the nuances, syntax, format and software dependencies needed for different platform deployments. To enable scale, UiPath will have engaged in similarly meaty (tofu and meat-free substitutes are also available) background engineering to provision for bigger data volumes, use of wider disparate cloud instances and so on.

This release of the UiPath platform also includes new capabilities to simplify the creation of public-facing processes and apps for customer service and value chain scenarios to streamline customer experiences. In other words, extended work to accommodate for more intuitive user interactions, based upon the ability to shape software automation to work in a way that makes people and processes happy.

In addition, UiPath offers a connection builder to simplify Application Programming Interface (API) connection to both in-house applications and specialized industry solutions and expand the automations and apps developers can build.

The company is also talking about a concept that it calls continuous discovery. This is designed to help users discover the as-is state of processes and tasks, take action to optimize them and to then continuously monitor them for ongoing improvement to achieve desired business outcomes.

Specifically, software upgrades here include UiPath Automation Hub with ROI to enable comparisons between estimated benefits and actual outcomes, enabling users to learn from successes and replicate them. There is also process mining with high scalability, improved performance and new analytics for better process insights. Additionally, lets also mention Assisted Task Mining, a service engineered to provide process improvement leaders with the ability to capture and document not only the common way a process is completed but also the natural variations that occur in the real world.

Our new features allow customers to automate an increasing number of business processes. In this release, the acquisition of Re:infer adds Communications Mining to the platform to unlock the value of the massive amounts of communications data generated by a business each day. Organizations can analyze emails, documents, chat logs, social messages, and more to create actionable business data and new opportunities for automation, notes the team, in a statement issued in line with the companys annual user event, known as UiPath Forward.

At its core (and as we have hopefully illustrated by now) automation is all about understanding. Its about creating software that can ingest, decompose and define elements of human workflows in the form of data in various shapes and forms and then be able to create digital structures around the higher-level tasks being carried out.

This truth is why we use terms like Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in the field of speech recognition and its why UiPath talks about its approach to Document Understanding (DU). New native support in Document Understanding for bank and financial statements and common supply chain documents (like packing lists) broadens the automation use cases that UiPath is now aiming to serve. Additionally, moving slightly sidewards from understanding to visual comprehension, AI Computer Vision has been now upgraded in UiPath to read new types of dynamic screen content, such as scrolling tables on the web and in apps.

Finally, for now, UiPath says its Automation Cloud is now supported for delayed enterprise releases that allow for more testing time and site-to-site VPN support in Automation Cloud Robots to allow robots to automate systems and data that reside in private clouds.

As we now increasingly adopt these types of software automations and business accelerators, what may make a difference most in this space is how quickly we can summon these [software] robots to work for us when a human working team defines and details a need for any given task.

That means not just software robots, but serverless software robots i.e. serverless (as we have explained before here) being systems that do have a server, but have enough back-end cloud-based girth not to have to detail the size or shape of that virtualized server base service right until it is needed.

The company thinks it has this aspect covered too. For customers that self-host, UiPath Automation Suite includes new updates for process mining and serverless robots, plus new enterprise capabilities such as Active-Active High Availability/Disaster Recovery support and lower resource requirements.

Software automation was already smart. By nature, it had to be. But if software automation has progressed here, then it sounds like it may have spent an extra year in business school.

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UiPath Steers Automation Closer To Business Processes - Forbes