Design
The section deals with specific of implementing an RPA project with WorkFusion, covering the topics of design and estimation, typical cases and solutions, measuring results based on target.
RPA effort estimation
Common customer questions
What is the basis of time estimate for implementation?
RPA projects vary in complexity and resource requirements depending on the complexity and stability of the underlying technology. We distinguish five levels of RPA automation, starting from the simplest:
- Level 1: API Automation (APIs, File Exchange, Database, ETL)
- Level 2: Web Scraping and Crawling (static web applications/sites)
- Level 3: Web Automation (dynamic web applications/sites)]
- Level 4: Desktop Automation (legacy applications and Internet Explorer applications)
- Level 5: Surface Automation (screen-only tools, image recognition)
Capacity planning
Common customer questions
How many bot accounts do you need? At what stage do I need to scale the hardware for running bot processes?
The number of nodes available on the RPA machine was determined before installation under hardware requirements and in default installation will be 5. At the beginning of an RPA project the question will usually come up again, for example, for determining the number of bot accounts that need to be created in the target systems.
Having determined the number of bots required, you can proceed to determining the needed hardware based on deployment (VDI or server).
Design in large projects
Design stage in a short and simple RPA project may be not pronounced. In such cases, where the implementation team is small and follows simplified development lifecycle, RPA Express with it's Recorder is the main tool. Implementation with recorder will start shortly after requirements and target systems review. On the contrary, design stage is important for large RPA implementations.
Design phase prerequisites and output
Getting access to target systems for developers and for bots is a prerequisite for proceeding to the next stage - implementation. Other prerequisites include having documented requirements from customer that include step by step guide to the process along with screenshots of each page, button and action, and preferably accompanied with a walk-through of the process in target systems by SMEs. If the requirements are not detailed enough, walk-through is a must. Based on these requirements and system investigation by the dev team they will produce (typically in larger projects) a technical design document, describing target applications' pages' functionality that needs to be automated with corresponding classes and methods, as well as process block diagrams and manual tasks where applicable. When completed, this document is sent to customer for sign off.