Gartner coined the term hyperautomation to describe how the combination of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), process mining, decision management, and more can be used together in an end-to-end automation solution.
The recent UiPath 2020 Fast Track release 20.4 adds literally hundreds of new features and exciting new capabilities across every stage of the automation lifecycle.
The UiPath Automation Hub is the ‘operating system’ for the Center of Excellence (CoE) to effectively manage the automation lifecycle wit:h instant visibility, transparency, and control. UiPath Automation Hub now offers branding options, new dashboards, and saved views for your team to truly make Automation Hub your own.
Through a UiPath Task Capture and Automation Hub integration you can launch Task Capture directly from Automation Hub to quickly create a process definition document (PDD) and send it from Task Capture to Automation Hub.
Process Mining joined the product family in October 2019 through an acquisition. It is now deeply integrated into the UiPath Platform, and delivering new capabilities.
The 20.4 release includes an improved Process Compare dashboard that now includes comparisons over two periods. This makes it possible to compare changes in a process over time, for instance, to see the impact that implementing a new automation might have had. Process Mining has also been updated with UiPath branding including logos and colors.
The new release has improved localization and added out-of-the-box language support for Japanese. Developers can now add new translations for other languages as desired.
UiPath Task Mining is a completely new product in the Discover phase in 20.4.
Task Mining leverages a low-touch way to discover employee workflows by setting up centralized process capture from the admin portal and securely capturing real employee data with no interruption to their activities. The turnkey solution uses AI to get scientific process maps, a true pulse on repetitive tasks, and provides machine learning (ML)-discovered automation suggestions.
Task Mining captures only whitelisted applications and anonymizes and aggregates individual data. Data upload and transfer is encrypted and secured. Get the benefits of full integration with the entire end-to-end UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform with one-click exports into UiPath Studio and complete impact assessment after deployment with UiPath Insights.
Build UiPath Studio has always been about empowering the developer and delivering the best environment to build automations. This release is a special one for Studio. It is evolving from a single offering to a family of products. UiPath Studio now offers a dedicated experience based on the user’s level of expertise. We like to say that there is an edition of Studio for everyone.
There are a ton of new features across the family from a new UI Automation approach to robust governance.
UiPath Studio Pro is the new home for high-end developer capabilities. In the initial release, we have Application Testing and RPA Testing, including Mobile Automation to cover all the testing needs within your company. Studio Pro is a key component of a larger UiPath Test Suite to design and map test cases and their execution results to requirements and defects in Jira to deeply integrate testing. This is a major new area for the platform and one that will enable you to deliver a higher quality automation program.
Another new product in the 20.4 release is UiPath Document Understanding which combines RPA and AI to help you extract and interpret data from different documents and ensure end-to-end document processing. UiPath Document Understanding works with a wide range of documents including:
– Structured forms like passports or timesheets
– Semi-structured documents like invoices, receipts, and purchase orders
— Unstructured documents like emails or contracts
It is also able to recognize different objects like tables, handwriting, signatures, and checkboxes in addition to being able to deal with various file formats.
Available directly from UiPath Studio, Document Understanding provides drag-and-drop elements designed for intelligent document processing. Leverage a combination of approaches including templates and ML models, to automate complex document-intensive processes. This ensures rapid and accurate results even when the location of data fields changes or documents are scanned at an angle.
Integrated within the UiPath Platform, Document Understanding can work with any tasks involving documents, to save time, reduce error and security risks of manual document processing.
Manage
Version 19.10, introduced zero-touch provisioning for attended robots and processes to UiPath Orchestrator. This release, further increase UiPath Orchestrator scalability by adding zero-touch provisioning for unattended robots and processes, so you can now manage your entire robot and process infrastructure from within modern folders—optionally with active directory (AD) integration. This simplifies enterprise-scale deployment and removes the need to manage software robots in two different ways. In 20.4, you can:
1. Create a user with an unattended robot
2. Create a machine template
3. Associate those to a folder
4. Execute them on any machine
A new unique option for unattended robots to choose to run multiple jobs in a single Microsoft Windows session (using different user credentials)— to scale the return on your hardware investments.
There are many othe rnew UiPath Orchestrator features.
Job Prioritization
– Storage Buckets that developers can use to store binary large objects (BLOBs) at a folder level
– New compare capabilities in the Package Explorer that show the changes between versions of a package
– Support in Orchestrator for personal folders, which enable Studio and StudioX users to publish their automation packages to themselves, have a process automatically created, and have the process appear in their own robot tray (broader library and deployment permissions are still respected for any publication or distribution beyond the user themselves).
– In addition to the plumbing to make this work, the Orchestrator user interface (UI) adds the ability to turn personal folders on overall and choose whether to automatically provision a personal folder to a user.
Back in January, 2020 UiPath released the first version of UiPath AI Fabric, which allows you to apply AI to your RPA workflows in minutes. In this release, the AI Fabric has been enhanced to include Model Retraining that allows exceptions and corrections to make the models better over time. This means the more you use AI Fabric, the harder it can work for you; and your robots will learn from their mistakes and become better at their job over time.
There are several pre-trained Starter Models for common use cases. These allow you to easily get started with UiPath AI Fabric. For example:
– The Language Identification model allows customer service teams to automate routing of tickets to specific departments. – Sentiment Analysis model allows customer service teams to prioritize tickets that need urgent attention based on customer feedback.
This release includes the first delivery of AI Fabric on-premises. It initially supports UiPath first-party models such as those used by UiPath Document Understanding. It will be enhanced over the months ahead to achieve parity with AI Fabric in the UiPath Automation Cloud. This will include support for capabilities such as custom model deployment, single click scalability, and high availability deployments options.
Run
While the automation industry began with unattended scenarios running in the back office, we have always believed in also empowering all employees with the power of attended automation and their very own software robots. This is a big focus of this release and worthy of its own detailed web page:
Expanded native integrations enable easier and more efficient automation across the applications you use every day. Today, UiPath offers more than 100 integrations with third-party technologies, built directly by UiPath or our community of over 300 technology partners.
This release, adda new native integrations with ServiceNow, NetSuite, Oracle, Workday, and Box and additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings, such as Amazon Textract, as well as additional Microsoft services, such as Microsoft Form Recognizer and Microsoft Dynamics.
Engage
The Engage phase of the automation lifecycle is all about software robots and people collaborating smoothly to get work done together. Sometimes a robot works alongside you helping you get you work done. We call that attended automation and UiPath is enhancing its robots with a new and improved attended experience called the UiPath Assistant. The modern and easy-to-use interface makes it easier to set preferred processes, install, run, and pause, or even set reminders for when a process needs to start.
Sometimes a robot works in the back-office processing (we call this unattended automation). Occasionally, that robot needs help. A person may need to validate or approve its work, or to answer a question the robot has not seen before. That’s where UiPath Action Center comes. UiPath Action Center provides a place for unattended robots to get help when they need it. A place for people to engage in unattended processes when they are needed. A place that keeps the work flowing.
This release, has built a completely new experience for the Action Center that will come to Cloud users first. It looks like this:
We also added important new capabilities to UiPath Action Center including support for easy integration with business process management (BPM) systems.
Measure
Back in January, we saw the first version of UiPath Insights delivering powerful, embedded analytics that measure, report, and align RPA operations with strategic business outcomes. This release, enables the ability to track and measure all robot types including their accuracy, availability, and capacity. Users can now gain seamless visibility into business outcomes with custom-defined metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). There’s also simpler support for organizational-wide decision making with shareable dashboards, forecasting, ML-based anomaly detection embedded directly within UiPath Orchestrator.
Additionally, Insights’ growing out-of-the-box dashboard library now includes: Processes, Queues, Robots, Licensing, and Business ROI, extensible to include Long Running Workflows through the UiPath Marketplace.
UiPath Enterprise RPA Platform offers a tremendous set of new capabilities and is truly built for hyperautomation
