Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

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Use case - Automating the Automation (Solution deployments using RPA)

By Raghav Gupta posted Wed September 29, 2021 02:47 PM

  
Deploying an end to end solution on automation cloud pak is cumbersome. Each component/feature in this cloud pak is a product in itself and there is no platform wide export/import facility to save and restore an industry solution. Each product has its own export/import functionality and APIs that can help automate the import/deploy of artifacts specific to that product. A typical industry solution like Procure to Pay spans across many of these products (like capture, content, workflow, RPA and rules) and ties them together with OOTB (Out of the Box) or custom integrations. Even with deploy/configure playbooks and associated artifacts made available, a solution developed in 3 months takes at least 3 days to replicate in a fresh environment

To reduce the time to deploy from 3 days to 3 hours, the proposal is to automate the manual steps for importing the artifacts and configuring the solution. Proposal is to make available a IBM RPA master script (a framework) that consumes a configuration file for deployment. Individual parts of the deployment are taken care by RPA feature scripts which is one each for each CP4BA component (BAW, ODM...). Configuration file should contain the source artifacts path, the component API endpoints and authentication details along with the order of deployment. Once launched, the master script takes care of deploying the artifacts to the various parts of the cloud pak.  At a later point, this can be enhanced as an export/import solution for the entire platform as well.

Flow of Solution Deployment using RPA




Shows artifacts and configuration file
Config file - Contains the details about the host system where components resides, authentication details , executable code path. For various solution using same component, config file is what holds the information

Master script - The main script which controls the flow and decide which component solution uses based on input provided in the config file. It controls the execution of component files.

Component script - Based on component supported, there are different component files(eg: for ODM, BAW etc). These component files configures a specific component mostly via API call. If some solution is using out of box component, custom component file could be provided for it.

Here is a demo video explaining the proposal - 


Here are the files in a zip format which were used in the video - https://ibm.box.com/s/lctm9xik5gkw0ty6kgg5ar9saf6qgd7t

#industryusecase #UseCase #ibmautomation#IBMrpa#deployment#automateddeployment​​​​​​
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