This is our very first article about learning robotic process automation. Process automation strategy matters and the success of your automation program will depend on understanding how and where RPA will impact your organisation.
We receive quite frequent emails where we are asked about our consulting services. The answer is as follows: we ourselves offer clients RPA-related basic training, based on our cross-industry RPA implementations and experience. We advise that during the long and winding implementation road, our clients address questions such as:
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How will your employees be affected?
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Have you targeted the most ideal processes for automation?
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What is your HR/ people strategy around the rollout of RPA?
Otherwise, however, we recommend the UiPath tutorials, which are designed by experts in the field to be goal-oriented towards successful RPA journeys. Robotic process automation tutorials can assist you from the level of absolute beginner, all the way to becoming a fully skilled automation user.
These tutorials share quality resources, such as the UiPath RPA Community Forum, RPA Academy, Academic Alliance, and last but certainly not least, the community edition, a free version of the UiPath software.
What can you do with RPA?
By means of automating back-office to front-office processes across a wide range of industry sectors, you can streamline the business workflow, achieving accuracy improvements, shorter processing times, and revenue leakage reductions, all of which lead to significant service cost decrease.
Processes that are manual, repetitive, rules based, high volume and high frequency, mature, stable, and with low exception rates, are a match made in heaven with RPA. We wrote several articles about robotic process automation use cases in various industries, such as telecommunications, healthcare, transportation and logistics, HR, etc.
Some cross-industry application areas are processes like quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay, as well as any data-related routine activities, like data migration and entry, data updates, or data validation.
What tutorials does UiPath offer?
Video tutorials
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Basic concepts
This is a set of RPA tutorials for beginners, meant to familiarise apprentices with the ABC’s of the main products of the UiPath RPA platform – UiPath Studio, UiPath Robot, and UiPath Orchestrator. Some minimal programming knowledge (e.g., variables, if/else decisions, loops) is helpful, but not necessary.
Tutorials introduce you to several kinds of workflows available in Studio. You can also learn about the four recording categories (Basic, Desktop, Web, and Citrix), which are the most accessible ways to create workflows made up from flowcharts and sequences. Additionally, they provide an introduction to variables and .Net functions, and to assets, queues, and role management tools such as logs, audits, and alerts.
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Excel Automation and DataTables RPA Tutorial for Beginners
Acquiring the ability to integrate data inputs and outputs into your RPA workflows is a foundational component of learning robotic process automation, and this is what you can get from this tutorial.
You will learn to handle Excel application scopes that facilitate work with all other Excel activities, e.g., Read Range, Append Range, and Read Cell. Common DataTable activities are also included. You will also have access to information about what you can actually do with these tools, based on their current utilisation for processing and storing data.
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Data manipulation
Knowledge of the three kinds of variables in Studio (scalar, collections, and tables) allows you to efficiently handle the available information in order to streamline the automation journey.
The tutorial also teaches you how to leverage the technicalities for convenient organisation of your automation projects, so that the main benefits of RPA, i.e., reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and extensibility, are exploited effectively.
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User interface automation
This is a series of three tutorials, Recording, Advanced UI Automation, and Selectors, which teach you some techniques for building software robots that can easily learn from human users by emulating their actions. The tutorials will allow you to create bots whose actions are triggered by accurate recognition of language and images observed on the interface.
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Citrix – virtual environment automation
This includes two tutorials, Citrix Automation and Advanced Citrix Automation. The overall learning objective is to develop your capacity to make the most out of automation by adding some manual effort into the picture, credit where credit’s due.
After going through the tutorials, you should be able to choose the optimal, most efficient way of supplementing the recorded workflow with standard, hand-operated actions. The advanced module will take you to the next level, showing you how to automate virtualised environments using the Find Image application to detect predetermined images.
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PDF data extraction and automation
You will learn to build software that can automatically detect and read PDFs, extract them from UI elements (e.g., emails), and use the screen scraping wizard to find particular bits of text. It also covers the extraction of changing values from similarly structured files.
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E-mail automation
Now you will learn to apply in practice the information acquired from the previous tutorial about extracting PDF data. It will allow you to make email interactions part of the automation journey.
Process inputs (names, IDs, attachments) and outputs (reports to managers and potential warnings when encountering exceptions to a process) are the two main forms of email communication that are relevant from the RPA point of view, and this tutorial focuses precisely on that.
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Project organisation
This video paves your way towards well-organised automation projects, which are reliable, efficient, maintainable and extensible. It does so by teaching you how to streamline the workflows and how to improve their readability.
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Debugging and exception handling
You will learn how to leverage the debug component of the UiPath Studio. This means you will be better able to track the data that goes into automations and, ultimately, to identify output production bugs.
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SAP automation
The video teaches you efficient means for using SAP software for enterprise resource planning. It goes through means such as specific methods for optimally setting up the workflow, workflow recording, or text extraction. If you want to find out more about growing you SAP applications through RPA, we’ve written an article on the subject.
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Agent assisted automation
This is an introduction to user-attended automation, one of the two types of RPA. You will learn the ins and outs of user events and user assisted automation in UiPath, which are necessary for, e.g., capturing user input data, or differentiating synchronous from asynchronous events.
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Orchestrator
This is an advanced tutorial, which assumes that you already have some basic knowledge about automation projects, activity properties, and passing variables between activities. It is now time to learn about managing your bots’ actions, handling package versions, facilitating the automation process by leveraging each available resource, using Queues and Schedules, etc.
UiPath Academy
This is a platform with online courses designed by top-ranking experts in the field. It comprises a series of free of charge, self-led tutorials, ranging from the level of absolute beginners (e.g., RPA Awareness Training) to more advanced courses (e.g., RPA Developer Advanced Training).
The preconditions depend on the tutorial level, and vary from none at all, to rather complex ones like Foundation and Orchestrator. All tutorials are available in English, and some of them also in French and even Japanese. Upon completion, you get a course diploma.
The Academy offers six RPA role based trainings and four new courses. The role based trainings are:
The new courses are:
What certifications can you get from UiPath?
If you are a freelancer, an individual contributor, or a UiPath customer or partner, and you decide to earn your role with the UiPath Academy, in 4 weeks you can obtain the RPA Developer Advanced Certification – find more information about certifications here. Hurry and sign up, because it is free of charge until the end of December 2019.
Conclusion
Learning RPA appears to be the smart thing to do right now. According to a new study from the Information Services Group (ISG), the RPA market will keep growing worldwide, and the technology will be more and more widely adopted, which means that there will be correspondingly more jobs available, e.g., RPA Lead, RPA Analyst, Automation analyst, Automation consultant, Head of Automation.
Between 2016 and 2018, the number of RPA jobs had already multiplied 15 times, and Technojobs reports assure us that the trend continues. RPA is slowly but surely moving into the mainstream, so it makes perfect sense to use robotic process automation tutorials to deepen your knowledge.
