Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Robot

What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a method of automating business processes that can help move mundane tasks out of humans hands and into the digital realm of a software robot. RPA can be a good solution when you want to automate clear and defined processes that are any of the following:

However, not all processes are good candidates for such automation. For example, many companies try automation to help solve the fact that they do not have clearly-defined processes. These companies tend to overly complicate an automation, leaving loopholes for automation errors, automating the wrong thing, or getting lost trying to reverse-engineer the process. As such, it is important to ensure that any process you want to try to automate is clearly defined before attempting automation.

Use Cases for RPA

Categories Suitable for RPA

Functional Areas Suitable for RPA

Updating Information

Batch inserts, updates, or deletion of information.

Finance

Sales order processing, invoice processing, and accounts payable.

Migrating Information

Moving information from one system to another.

Management Reporting

Gathering information from other sources and consolidating into Microsoft Excel files.

Urgent Tasks

Any process with a trigger that requires immediate attention.

Marketing

List management, email, social, and digital marketing.

System Monitoring

Monitor critical business systems.

IT and HR

Staff onboarding and offboarding.

What Is Planview's RPA Robot?

Planview has partnered with UiPath to build RPA robots that help you automate your business processes, such as user, resource, and rates administration. The Planview Robot performs tasks from recipes, such as the User Administration recipe. These Planview Robot recipes are free to use and are downloadable from the UiPath Connect Marketplace. The recipes come in two flavors: UI automation recipes and API automation recipes.

The following table explains the differences between the two types of Planview Robot recipes.

UI Automation

API Automation

The configuration of screens that rely on the automation cannot be changed without breaking the automation recipe.

The most desirable method, as it will be less volatile and not be impacted by monthly product updates.

With Planview-published recipes that use the UI, Planview will update and republish recipes that are impacted by any UX changes in future Planview Enterprise One releases.

Recipes in development will be utilizing the public SOAP APIs and can be run in batches, and an unlimited number of batches can be performed.

With robots and recipes that a customer creates, the customer is responsible for updating them if a future Planview Enterprise One release breaks the recipe.

Batch process types have the following limits:

  • Upsert Batch Process – Maximum of 300 per batch.
  • Delete Batch Process – Maximum of 100 per batch.

           

How Do I Get the Planview Enterprise One RPA Robot and Planview Recipes?   

To get the Planview RPA Robot and recipes to use:

  1. Sign up for UiPath Account at https://platform.uipath.com.

  2. Search for Planview in the UiPath Connect Marketplace at https://connect.uipath.com/ to find Planview-developed recipes, as shown in the following image:

               

    Click to expand or shrink

    Planview recipes in the UiPath Connect Marketplace

               

           

           

Planview Recipes in UiPath Marketplace

The following table lists the Planview-published recipes that are available in the UiPath Connect Marketplace.

UI Recipe API Recipe API Library for RPA Engineers

Planview - Create New User

Planview - Update Resource Information

Planview - Rates Administration

Planview - Update Resource

 Planview - Enterprise One Activities

           

           

Requirements and Availability

  • You must have an active administrator license for Planview Enterprise One release 18 or Continuous Cloud.
  • You can download the free Community Edition of UiPath Studio and use Planview's recipes at no cost if all of the following are true:
    • UiPath Studio is only downloaded onto a single system for one administrator to use.
    • You do not need to schedule any of the recipes to run.
    • You do not need to have a robot perform complex business automation, such as retrieving data from multiple sources and making decisions to determine what and when to update.
    • You do not need additional support.

  • Otherwise, additional licensing with UiPath may be required; contact UiPath if you need to upgrade your license.

           

NOTE

When RPA (UI Path recipes) were developed in early 2020, Internet Explorer was still a supported browser. Although Planview ended support for Internet Explorer elsewhere in the application, RPA currently only supports the use of Internet Explorer 11. We hope to align browser support for non-Internet Explorer browsers in the future.