RPA | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum. (2)

In the previous blog, Birthday wishes from MuleSoft Composer, we explained how to use Composer and its connectors to configure and set up simple process automation. We automated repetitive tasks of tracking and sending birthday and work anniversary wishes to our employees. Today we utilise MuleSoft further to deliver end-to-end automation of the complete process. In addition to messages, we will build Bots to order and post delicious Lola's cupcakes for our special occasions.

Insurance claims, invoices, various forms and applications - every organisation deals with a wide range of unstructured documents. Although manual extraction of critical information is still typical, many departments invest in automating such processes.

In the previous blog Publish MuleSoft RPA into Exchange and invoke it from a Mule API I demonstrated the step-by-step process of calling a MuleSoft bot from a Mule API.

In the second part of my blog about MuleSoft RPA in action, I’d like to show the complete automation process - from process evaluation to design, build and execution. I hope it will help you see the potential of Mulesoft RPA and how you can apply it to improve the efficiency of your processes.

After testing MuleSoft RPA (Robotic Process Automation), the new automation tool released only a few weeks ago, I cannot wait to share my thoughts. But let me start with a few tips for creating a stable RPA automation:

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools are designed to carry out all human repetitive tasks. Bots can retrieve information from legacy and modern applications and extract data from emails, documents and even web pages. They interact with applications using keyboard and mouse clicks just like we humans do. MuleSoft is a new player in the RPA market. MuleSoft RPA was released only a few weeks ago, and the great news is that it is fully integrated with MuleSoft Anypoint Platform and Composer.

Here is a challenge for you - how to create an API that retrieves data from a cloud-based system with no external APIs? In the situations like this, it would make a perfect sense to access the data via the system's UI using robotic automation bots. Your API can invoke a bot to read the required information. To implement this solution and enable APIs to Bots requests, we need an API-RPA connector.

Are post-it's enough?

Recently a few of our team members attended Celonis SuperFluid Tour in London, where we found that post-it notes and a whiteboard are still one of their biggest competitors. Celonis, for those unaware, offer a solution, powered by process mining technology that empowers companies to visualise their processes, thus providing insights to which of these can be improved. It can come as a surprise, that in the age of digital transformation, many organisations are satisfied with getting the room's opinion during a whiteboard and/or post-it note session as the best process discovery technique.

The artist Pablo Picasso once said you should learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist. It’s clear he wasn’t in charge of a large corporation, though. Breaking the rules in business is costly, and it’s getting even more so. According to research by Thomson Reuters, 61% of compliance and risk practitioners expected to spend more on complying with rules and regulations in 2019 than they had in 2018.

Many business documents, from invoices to medical records, are boring, necessary and tedious to deal with. And until recently only humans had the ability to process them, locking smart people into low-value work. But now, technology has got to the point where it can not only read standard documents but also pick relevant information out from images and designs in complex layouts.