BOT Developement

Business Process Analysis

• Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a methodology for the
analysis of a business with a view to understanding the
processes and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of its
operations. It describes the processes involved, parties
participating, information exchanged and documents
produced.

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Business process analysis can be used to
achieve the following:
• To document implicit knowledge, capture and record manual and
sometimes non-documented processes, i.e. process manuals for
both private and public sectors
• To analyse individual actions, documents and data involved in
international trade, which jointly or individually involve
commercial, transport, regulatory and financial procedures

• To locate problematic areas that cause delays in moving goods from

seller to buyer across borders, such as unnecessary forms and
documents and repetitive data elements

• To identify opportunities for improvements, such as reducing the

number of trade documents and minimizing data requirements

• RPA as a technology is still evolving and has a long way to go,

even with its current state, RPA can add significant value to
business operations. A structured\tailored approach to start
with and optimizing as the organization moves along in this
journey will help guide in the right direction
• The following 10 step approach can be used as a boilerplate to
start with for automating a business process:

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• Process Analysis
• Feasibility study:
• Planning:
• Requirement gathering and analysis:
• Architecture and design
• Development:
• Testing:
• Deployment:
• Training and workshop
• Documentation

Activities
• When creating bots, you will spend much time in the Design part of
the UiPath Studio and work quite a bit with the Activities . Some of
these will involve simple drag and drops with a little configuration.
But others will be more involved and intricate.
• So to get a sense of the types of things you can do with Activities,
which are as follows:
• Workflow:

• UI Automation:

• User Events:

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• Programming
• Orchestrator
• App Integration:
• Computer Vision:
• System:

Flowcharts & Sequences

• It’s recommended to start the creation of a bot with the flowchart or
a sequence.
• Both are a great way to provide a structure and visualization, which
will go from the top of the screen to the bottom.
• Go to the Activities tab and go to Workflow ➤ Flowchart ➤
Flowchart and then drag and drop it onto the Main screen and click it.

• you can drag and drop activities onto the Flowchart.

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Log Message
• As a bot gets more advanced, you want to take steps to document the
workflow. One approach with UiPath Studio is to use the Log Message
activity (it’s at Programming ➤ Debut ➤ Log Message).
• Drag and drop this onto a flowchart or sequence and then enter a
comment. You will also indicate the type or log level: Fatal, Error,
Warn, Info, and Trace.
• When you run the bot, the Log Messages will appear on the Output
screen at the bottom instead of on Main screen and will be included
in the UiPath Orchestrator.

Variables
• To use RPA, you need to have a good understanding of variables.
• They are containers – which you give a name – that hold data, such
as text and numbers.
• To create a variable in UiPath Studio, you will click the Variables tab,
which is at the bottom of the Main screen.

• Select “Create variable” and then enter a name. There should not be
any spaces and it’s recommended to use Pascal case.

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Variable
• Boolean: This has only two values – that is, true and false. This is
usually for loops and if/then/else statements.
• Int32: This variable can only hold integers, which means there are no
decimal points.
• String: This is text data, such as contact information, articles, etc.
• Object: This is a custom-built data type, which may include a blend of
other variable types. For example, you could create an object that
holds contact information.

• System DataTable: This is to handle large datasets. This is actually common

for RPA since it deals with such things as Excel spreadsheets.

• Array of [T]: An array is a string of values. You can use loops to manipulate
this type of data.
• Browse for Types: This will open a new menu that provides a large
assortment of other unique variable types.
• This allows you to access the .Net framework, which makes it possible to
access deeper into your computer’s system. Just some of the types include
decimal, date, and password.

•.

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Loops & Conditionals
• Loops are a core part of computer programming languages. It is a way
to repeat a set of instructions – say, to search for something and add
numbers – until a condition is met.
• The types of loops in UiPath include
• For Each
• Do While
• Switch

For Each Loop

• The For Each loop will cycle through a set of data, such as arrays, lists,
database tables, and files.
• To see how this works, you will first drag and drop a Sequence on the
Main screen and then put a For Each activity on it (this will be at
Workflow ➤ Control ➤ For Each).

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Do While Loop and While Loop
• A Do While Loop will continue until a condition is triggered. Unlike a
For Each loop, you do not know how many times it will cycle through
or if it will even need to do so.
• Here’s an example. Drag and drop a Sequence on the Main screen and
put the Do While Loop activity inside it (at Workflow ➤ Control ➤ Do
While).

Common UiPath Functions

• These are at the core of RPA functionality.
• UiPath has provided a test environment – called Acme System 1 – to help
with this, which is at https://acme-test.uipath.com/account/login. It
essentially emulates a company, such as with accounts for vendors, checks,
and invoices.

• To use Acme System 1, press Register and enter your e-mail and password.
Next, we will create a bot to login. To do this, you must have the Microsoft
Edge extension installed, which you can access from the Tools menu item
on the start screen of the UiPath Studio.

• You will then press Launch and Turn On after it is downloaded. Go to create
a bot by dragging and dropping a Sequence on the Main screen (Workflow
➤ Control ➤ Sequence).
• Then go to the Record at the top and select “Web.” As the name implies,
this will record your actions on a web site, which will be Acme System 1.

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• Another common function of RPA is Screen Scraping. UiPath Studio
actually makes it fairly easy to do this. You will select “Screen
Scraping” at the top of the screen and then go to a web page that has
information.
• For example, it may be a table of data and UiPath will automatically
detect this.
• It will then ask if you want to scrape all of it. It will also see if the data
spans multiple pages and UiPath will handle this, such as put it in a
Data Table.
• This makes it easy to manipulate within the bot with Excel or another
application.

The UiPath Orchestrator

• once you have finished creating a bot, you will need to manage it.
. This is done by using the UiPath Orchestrator.
• In terms of deployment, you can either have this software on your
own servers or the cloud (at cloud.uipath.com).
• Regardless of which option you choose, you can have separate
instances of the software.
• For example, you could have ones for development, staging, and
production, which should help simplify the bot development process.
Or you could have instances for different departments, say, for human
resources, finance, and marketing.

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• Robots: This is where you can register your bots.
• Processes: On the left side, there is a + button, which allows for the
creation of new processes. This essentially brings in the bots that
were created in the UiPath Studio.
• Jobs: This shows the bots that are in operation or have been in
operation.
• Schedules: You can set the times for deploying the bots.
• Assets: You can create variables for the Orchestrator (text, Boolean,
integer, and credential, which is for the logins).
• Queues: This is an advanced system to help manage bots.

Best Practices for Bot Development

• Developing a bot can be a matter of a few drag and drops. But of
course, if you want to design a good one that gets results, then there
are some best practices to keep in mind:
• Templates and Bot Stores: Before designing a bot, see if there is
already one available. The top RPA providers have their own stores as
well as libraries. So do some checking first.
• Reusable Workflows: This means you can design your bot from
smaller parts. Of course, this helps to reduce the complexity. But
there is another important benefit: easier updates.
•

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• Be the Bot! Actually, designing an effective bot takes a change in
mindset. It’s not about completely replicating the actions of a human.
One reason is that the process may be fairly inefficient. What’s more,
a bot will run 24/7 (a human, of course, can put in about eight hours
or so). The key is that you should think like…a bot!
• Readability: Take the time to make sure your workflows and code are
easy to understand. One part of this is to set up a standard naming
convention for the activities and variables.

• Think About the Business: “Bot development should involve the

business teams and the IT teams working together,” said Asheesh
Mehra, who is the cofounder and CEO of AntWorks.

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Evaluation of Bots
1.Self-service rate: percentage of user sessions that did not end with
a contact action after using the bot.
2.Performance rate: number of correct answers divided by the number
of active sessions (a correct answer is an answer suggested by the
bot and clicked by the user in case of multiple choices – or opened
instantly in case of strong semantic matching).
3.Usage rate per login: volume of active user sessions on the chatbot.
To balance out with the average number of sessions on your
website.
4.Bounce rate: volume of sessions where the chatbot was opened but
not used
5.Satisfaction rate: average grade given when evaluating the chatbot’s
answers (to balance out with the evaluation rate).

6. Evaluation rate: percentage of user sessions that have given an

evaluation of the chatbot’s answers at least once.

7. Average chat time: allows you to evaluate your users’ interest for your
chatbot.
8. Average number of interactions: used to evaluate the Customer Effort
Score on the chatbot and must be correlated to the satisfaction rate. If the
latter is very low, the bot may be engaging the users in too many branches
and steps to meet their needs. In this case, a resolution can be to correct
the decision trees or knowledge base architecture.
9. Goal completion rate: in case your bot contains targeted actions like
CTAs, a form or some cross-selling, that is the rate of users who have
reached that specific action through the chatbot.
10. Non-response rate: the amount of times the chatbot has failed to push
some content following a user question (due to lack of content or
misunderstanding).

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