On May 13th, 2020, UiPath launched the latest version of its Enterprise RPA Platform, Version 20.4. This release has been labelled as “Built for Hyperautomation” by UiPath with capabilities spanning across multiple areas of the process automation lifecycle.
This blog post details the points discussed during the review and the latest product releases from UiPath.
What is Hyperautomation?
Gartner coined the term Hyperautomation and named it as one of the #1 strategic technology trend for enterprises in 2020. Hyperautomation refers to the combination of multiple technology areas including RPA, AI/ML, iBPMS and more to allow organizations to expand their automation capabilities.
Why is UiPath calling it the Platform for Hyperautomation?
The goal of UiPath’s Enterprise RPA platform is to assist customers in the entire lifecycle of automation, from discovery to creation, insights to management.
So how does UiPath help with discovery?
In this release, UiPath is improving upon its end-to-end automation platform with a further emphasis on process discovery.
Automation Hub
Automation Hub is UiPath’s central portal for crowd-sourcing user ideas for automation. With Automation Hub, enterprises can provide their users with an idea zone where they can submit new candidate processes for automation, evaluate for ROI and share reusable robots within the organization.
Process Mining
With process mining, the platform uses data from line of business applications such as SAP and Salesforce and allows you to visualize processes that you have. UiPath not only shows you the process map, but also the repetitiveness of certain paths within the process as well. This means that you can visualize the volume of a certain “Happy Path” within a process and make automation decisions accordingly.
Task Mining
But what about unstructured applications such as Microsoft Office. Task Mining allows the platform to capture tasks that people work on everyday and then assist in identifying candidate processes. It also allows you to quickly export them into Studio as a process template, enabling your teams to create automations rapidly.
Whats new around AI and Collaboration?
Document Understanding
UiPath announced its new Document Understanding capability that allows enterprises to extract information from documents. This can include structured documents like tax forms/driver’s licenses, semi-structured documents such as receipts/invoices (or) unstructured documents such as emails. You can learn more about the capabilities right here.
Action Center
So what happens when a robot cant extract data from a document (or) needs an approval? Here comes Action Center!
Action Center enables people to collaborate with robots for handling approvals, exceptions and more. The example given by Param during the session was of a robot trying to understand a hand-written note, and a human helping the robot out through Action Center.
This can help tremendously in cases where the Document Understanding has high exception rates (or) needs human validation before executing the next steps in the process.
AI Fabric
Another component of UiPath’s platform is the ability to bring in Machine Learning to your automations. This becomes critical for organizations as they take the next steps in their automation journeys. UiPath’s AI Fabric allows you to bring your own ML models (or) use pre-built ML models from UiPath as well.
Once you have a ML model deployed, your developers can simply drag and drop the intelligent capabilities into their automations within UiPath Studio.
Whats new with Studio?
With the 20.4 release, Studio is expanding into a family of products.
- StudioX – This is meant for citizen developers, a no-code experience for templating new processes
- Studio – This is for the RPA engineers within your Center of Excellence and now comes with new UI Automation capabilities in the latest release
- StudioPro – This is focussed on more niche focussed developers and brings capabilities such as Test Automation
UiPath Automation Cloud – “Start instantly, scale infinitely”
With the UiPath Automation Cloud, they envision customers to be able to sign up and create robots on managed infrastructure and robots within a matter of minutes.
So who is the Automation Cloud meant for?
UiPath Automation Cloud for Community – For smaller companies, this is free forever with 2 attended robots, 1 unattended robot and 2 studio licenses
UiPath Automation Cloud for Enterprise – Comes with uninterrupted uptime guarantee, UiPath’s dedicated support, data hosting options, multi-tenant capability and the ability to rapidly scale your RPA operations with a few clicks.
UiPath’s Automation Cloud is ISO27001 certified and Veracode certified from independent auditors while Encryption is being applied at rest and in motion. With data storage being supported for US, Europe and Japan, customers can choose where they want their data and processes to be located.
“A Robot for every person” says UiPath
During the release we got the chance to hear from Brandon Nott(SVP Product at UiPath) about their vision for automation in the world. UiPath’s vision is to provide a platform that allows everyone to have access to automation and robots, hence giving them the ability to offload mundane, everyday tasks while also participating in a community of ideas for automations.
Let’s see how UiPath is making this vision a reality through some of its latest product advancements.
UiPath Assistant, dubbed a “mini-you”, is software that runs on your desktop as your own assistant. It provides you a simple panel through which you can trigger new tasks that the robot will execute, all while allowing you to still continue your work in parallel.
But how do you create these automations? Welcome StudioX! StudioX allows you(Citizen Developers) to easily record tasks and create automations without writing any code at all. Imagine using Task Mining to identify repetitive tasks, importing that into StudioX, modifying your process and then using it from UiPath Assistant everyday – sounds good, right?
Automation Hub is where you can collaborate and manage your RPA initiatives. It allows you to share your ideas with your RPA Center of Excellence and also share automations that you’ve built with others in your team so that they can utilize the automation capabilities as well.
With StudioX and Automation Hub, UiPath envisions organizations to move away from the model of a centralized RPA CoE pushing automation to users and instead automation and ideas being crowd sourced within the organization. This can enable organizations to increase the velocity of their RPA initiatives and move towards a truly efficient organization.
For more information on the latest release, check out UiPath’s Box Set for Release 20.4 right here.
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