What is ServiceNow RPA?
Robotic Process Automation is a form of Business Process Automation where ‘robots’ are a substitute for people to perform routine, error-prone, and high-volume manual processes, usually interacting with legacy systems without APIs.
ServiceNow RPA Benefits
- Improved accuracy: RPA working is based on a set of rules, never deviating as they perform their tasks.
- Reliable: People can get complacent while doing repetitive tasks. RPA can do repetitive tasks, they approach every job with the same attention, thus significantly reducing the risk to the organization.
- Reduced costs: RPA can reduce the wage bill wasted on simple tasks, while also allowing businesses to use time more effectively. As a result, RPA significantly reduces processing costs, often providing a positive return on investment within one year.
- Enhanced scalability: RPA is scalable to accommodate growing business needs.
- Increased speed: RPA bots do not get tired, and they do not make mistakes. They are also capable of moving through processes very quickly without having to pause.
- More productivity: RPA allows talented workers to apply their skills to more valuable tasks. Employees have the time and freedom to accomplish more, improving productivity across the business.
- Unrestricted integration: RPA can integrate with any platform. This allows RPA to function with customers’ already-established systems.
- AI compatibility: Standard RPA can perform simple, rules-based tasks. AI-enhanced RPA robots can do even more. With the right AI technology, RPA can process unstructured data, recognize speech, apply machine learning models and natural language processing, and more.
Use Cases
Many employees spend much of their time engaged in repetitive, monotonous tasks. With ServiceNow RPA, many of those tasks can be automated, freeing employees to focus on more critical projects.
For example,
- Logging into applications
- Automating the filling of forms
- Collecting data from applications
- Extracting data from emails, PDFs, and forms by opening emails and attachments
- Filling the information in a form
- Making calculations
- Moving documents and files
Robotic Process Automation applications
The RPA Hub platform consists of four applications:
- RPA Hub: RPA Hub application provides a centralized orchestration to deploy, monitor, manage, measure, and verify compliance of all robots at an enterprise level.
- Unattended Robot: Unattended Robot is a software agent, install on a Windows machine. Unattended Robots can execute unattended automation without requiring any human intervention. Unattended Robot Login Agent is a software agent that you install on a Windows machine with Unattended Robot.
- Attended Robot: Attended Robot is a software agent that you install on an Attended Robot that can execute attended automation that requires human intervention.
- RPA Desktop Design Studio: RPA Desktop Design Studio is a Windows native application used by RPA developers to design or configure automation workflows.
Unattended and Attended Robot
How does it work?
Automated processes in RPA Hub are designed and built using Desktop Design Studio in Windows. Packaged, deployed, and managed from within ServiceNow Instance in RPA Hub. Executed on Windows machines using the runtime engines, either attended with user interaction or unattended, without interaction.
- Developers use RPA Desktop Design Studio to create automation (RPA and RDA) projects.
- The developer uploads the automation from RPA Design Studio to the ServiceNow Instance RPA Hub. It is available as a package in RPA Hub.
- A robot is created by defining the machine name (RPA) on which the automation will execute, or the username (RDA), that will execute the automation.
- The bot process is the mapping of packages and robots.
- On the runtime machines (VM/VDI for RPA and user desktops for RDA), the robot triggers and fetches the latest package version.
