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RPA IN ACTION : BUILDING ROBOTS LIVE AT SIG

  • Writer: amalabdreamz
    amalabdreamz
  • Nov 23, 2018
  • 4 min read

RPA in action : Live construction robots in GIS

During the 2017 SIG Global Summit in Amelia Island, Florida, Symphony was in charge of configuring and deploying a Robotic Process Automation Robot (RPA) from scratch in front of a live audience of more than 400 people. The team was responsible for automating part of the Honda talent acquisition process in two days. The co-founder and director of operations of Symphony, David Brain, explains how this unprecedented technical feat was developed.


With a glass of wine at the summit of Acresis founder, Dawn Tiura (CEO and President of SIG) offered me a unique challenge: to show what exactly the automation of a process entails, to do it on stage for a period of two days. conference. I was happy to accept, or at least I was that night. The next morning, the challenge began.


The plan

The mission was to configure an RPA robot from scratch for more than 28 hours in front of those attending the Global GIS Summit. We would be automating part of the Honda Human Resources talent acquisition management process. To spice things up, we decided on some rules:

• No reuse of pre-built components.

• There are no shortcuts in the documentation or approach.

• Capture and mapping of the preparatory process allowed.

• All the configuration had to be done on the site.

• The process must be automated from end to end.

Among the integrated systems that would be used were PeopleSoft, PeopleTicker, Sharepoint, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Excel. Symphony would configure the process using the Blue Prism RPA toolkit, using PeopleTicker and Denali Sourcing Services to contract sources and work data.



Our team was comprised of the co-founder and CSO of Symphony, Ian Barkin, the Director of Operations of the Americas, Eleas Wilson, and two of our talented consultants, Eric Gustafson and Nida Ul-Hasan.


RPA in Action

The day of the event, we immediately went to work. First, the mapped processes were validated by our team early in the morning. Then we went to the opening presentation and the question and answer session with Dawn and Bill Harris of Honda, before starting the configuration work with Blue Prism. Attendees were able to come freely to the 'Configuration Lab' that we had parked outside, where our process maps were shown and the team was working hard.


There, we configure the connections to each of the five systems that we automate and map the elements screen. Then, we started to create the actions that we would have to chain to create the business objects. Then, we build the business processes in Process Studio. To handle any exception of the system or process, we make sure to develop the capacity of recovery and the handling of the exceptions. As our consultants had to rest at some point and time was limited, we had our team from the Krakow Robotic Operations Center (ROC) at various points and while we slept.



There were some obstacles that we had to overcome throughout this challenge. For example, we could not get access to a non-production PeopleSoft environment to automate, so we had to create another web application to mimic those steps. Also, horribly, hours before running the live process, our Robot stayed out of PeopleTicker to process too many controls in 24 hours.

Its alive!


And then came the great revelation . "HE IS ALIVE!" These were the words that came to mind when we discovered the creation of our "Robot" RPA for two days, from start to finish, in front of the 400 people who attended the event. Although, at least for some, the creation may not be as dramatic as the creation of the creature depicted in Mary Shelly's classic novel (I accept it), it also had the same sense of relief and achievement for those involved, such as who did it . that . And I started working perfectly.


To take away

This was not a proof of concept, with only a few automated steps, but a complex end-to-end process that integrated three company applications and five systems. It consisted of 73 steps, 12 decision points, 25 pages of the blue prism process and 122 blue prism object layers. The time of completion of the process was reduced approximately 2 days, since it is only 2 minutes per case when it is automated.



Then, despite the minor obstacles, it ended up being a very successful implementation and a powerful demonstration of the potential of RPA. It was also a great opportunity to show attendees the entire configuration process, from the assignment to the test phases, and interact with them in each stage. We are very grateful to SIG for offering a unique challenge and we are proud.


 
 
 

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