Increase Operational Efficiency and Drive Faster Business Outcomes with UiPath Robots on AWS

By Meenakshisundaram Thandavarayan, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Seenu Brahmarouthu, Sr. Partner Development Manager – AWS
By Jessica Ng, Sr. Product Partnership Lead – UiPath

UiPath

Organizations are pursuing agility by developing automation for business processes using virtual robots.

Robotic process automation (RPA) makes it easy to build, deploy, and manage software robots that emulate humans’ actions interacting with digital systems and software. RPA adoption lies at the center of many digital transformation efforts.

To be effective, RPA technology must support you end-to-end, from discovering automation opportunities to quickly building high-performing robots, and from managing thousands of automated workflows to measuring the impact of your automations.

Enterprises need technology that can go far beyond simply helping you automate a single process. According to Gartner, “Robotic process automation remains the fastest-growing software market, as RPA is one of the popular choices for improving operational efficiency.”

UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation with the enterprise-ready cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) services, and intelligent automation solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) that provide the foundation to scale your enterprise automation.

This can help you accelerate deployment, integrate with AWS AI and machine learning (ML) services, and leverage built-in intelligent automation solutions such as customer experience in the contact center and document processing.

UiPath is an AWS Partner and leader in the “automation first” era that is enabling robots to learn new skills through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

UiPath platform on AWS provides the following capabilities:

• Increased speed and agility: Quickly deploy the UiPath platform on AWS using deployment accelerators:
  • AWS Quick Start for UiPath
  • AWS Marketplace
  • Automation Suite
• Stop guessing capacity: Eliminate the need to pre-warm your virtual machines (Amazon EC2) that are running robots, and allow UiPath to scale and manage your robots on AWS with Elastic Robot Orchestration.
• Get automating faster: Leverage pre-built UiPath and AWS intelligent automation solutions, including AWS IT automation activities and contact center automation.
• Boost intelligence in your automations: Seamless integration of UiPath RPA with AWS AI/ML services. UiPath’s integration with AWS AI devices opens up new use cases to bring AI into the business process by leveraging UiPath’s cognitive RPA capabilities.

RPA Primer

Before exploring how to leverage AWS and UiPath for digital automation, let’s quickly review the key components of any RPA solution.

Figure 1 – Key components of RPA.

The RPA Development phase represents the design of a process that needs to be automated. UiPath Studio is a design tool with drag-and-drop capability to design the process workflow.

Alternatively, processes can be designed using a recorder and customized in UiPath Studio. The output of RPA development is a process script.

The RPA Runtime phase represents the virtual robots that execute the process that’s designed using UiPath Studio. UiPath delivers these robots as attended and unattended.

Attended robots run under human supervision and, because of this, are best suited for use with smaller, more fragmented tasks that work closely alongside humans. Unattended robots are intended for more complex and highly repetitive tasks that don’t require human intervention. This usually needs to be performed in batches that can be decided using a predefined rule.

Based on the process and use case, UiPath can facilitate a seamless handoff between the attended and unattended robots.

The RPA Management phase enables you to manage the designed processes and schedule them to run on virtual robots. UiPath Orchestrator enables you to orchestrate your UiPath Robots in executing business processes. Orchestrator also lets you manage the creation, monitoring, and deployment of resources in your environment.

In addition to those core components, UiPath provides an end-to-end automation platform that starts with process discovery and task mining capabilities to discover what to automate.

The platform provides citizen and professional development capabilities to build, manage, and run robots, and human-in-the-loop capabilities to engage and govern human users. There are also analytics to measure the return on investment (ROI) from the automations.

Now, let’s now look at how AWS and UiPath can help accelerate your journey towards digital automation.

Deploying UiPath on AWS

AWS and UiPath provide you with flexibility in deploying the platform. From small automation projects to company-wide extensive scopes, the UiPath platform can scale on AWS to meet any enterprise need, from front to back office.

UiPath’s prebuilt auto-deployment templates on AWS ensure fast deployment and quick ROI for time and cost savings.

You can deploy the UiPath automation platform on your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or leverage the UiPath Automation Cloud with Elastic Robot Orchestration to reduce your overhead on maintenance.

You can choose to install the core components of the RPA platform—UiPath Orchestrator and UiPath Robots—on your VPC using the AWS Quick Start for UiPath.

AWS Quick Starts are ready-to-use accelerators that fast-track deployments of key cloud workloads for customers. These accelerators reduce hundreds of manual procedures into automated, workflow-based reference deployments for AWS Partner technologies, built according to AWS best practices.

Figure 2 – AWS Quick Start for UiPath.

You can choose to deploy the UiPath end-to-end automation platform via UiPath Automation Suite. This enables you to install the complete UiPath suite of products and capabilities on AWS as a single, containerized suite with scaling, high availability, and backup capabilities in your VPC.

UiPath Automation Suite helps you manage all of your automation work and resources in one place. You can keep track of licenses, add multiple tenants with different services, manage user access across services, create/connect to UiPath Robots, run jobs and processes, and create schedules-all from one centralized location of your choice.

Please refer to the UiPath documentation that details out how to deploy Automation Suite on your VPC.

Figure 3 – UiPath Automation Suite on AWS.

You can also leverage UiPath’s Elastic Robot Orchestration capability that is enabled with the UiPath Automation Cloud.

With Elastic Robot Orchestration, you can dynamically provision, scale, and optimize unattended robots from UiPath Automation Cloud to your VPC. This helps lower your cost of operations and reduce the overhead of managing, patching, and upgrading the UiPath Orchestrator and Robots.

Figure 4 – Elastic Robot Orchestration and UiPath Automation Cloud.

To leverage UiPath Automation Cloud with Elastic Robot Orchestration, create a generalized Amazon Machine Image (AMI) you want to use as a template for robots. Next, log in to UiPath Automation Cloud and set up your tenant.

Connect your tenant to your AWS account / VPC where you wish to run the robots, and then register the AMI as a cloud machine pool in your tenant.

UiPath Automation Cloud can elastically orchestrate the creation of virtual machines in your VPC, install the robot runtime, and execute the process. Once completed, it shuts down the virtual machines. For step-by-step instructions, refer to UiPath documentation.

Leveraging AWS AI/ML to Drive Cognitive Automation

Once the UiPath platform is deployed on AWS, you can start building your processes using UiPath Activities—the building blocks to create the automation process—in UiPath Studio.

Activities form into comprehensive workflows in UiPath Studio, which are then executed by Robots and published to Orchestrator.

UiPath Robots are great at emulating repetitive rules-based activities more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly, but they require humans for reasoning and judgement. When UiPath Robots can reason over data and use AWS AI to make decisions, your business can unlock new transformation possibilities.

UiPath and AWS have created Activities that natively integrate UiPath RPA with AWS AI/ML services to bring artificial intelligence capabilities directly into the business process.

Next, we’ll address a real-life use case of extracting valuable information. Unstructured data volume within organizations are increasing quickly, and companies are rapidly falling behind in leveraging it.

Business units like finance and human resources, as well as document-intensive industries such as insurance, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, and the public sector, spend countless hours reading documents, pulling information from them, and making sure the correct action is taken based on that information.

Below is a reference architecture of UiPath leveraging AWS AI services to address the intelligent document processing. For the purpose of simplicity, you can categorize the architecture in to two broad components.

• UiPath end to end automation platform:
  • UiPath Orchestrator with high availability add-ons.
  • Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for process repository.
  • UiPath Robots running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances.
• AWS AI services for natural language processing (NLP):
  • Amazon Textract for document processing.
  • Amazon Comprehend for document classification.
  • Amazon Translate for language translation.
  • Amazon Rekognition for detecting text from images in the document.
  • Amazon SageMaker for custom NLP models.

Figure 5 – UiPath on AWS reference architecture.

UiPath powered by Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, and other AI services, can read, extract, interpret, classify, and act upon data from the documents with a high level of accuracy and reliability.

This enables automation of various document-intensive business chores which usually require highly-manual processing. The includes invoice processing, insurance claims, new-patient onboarding, proof of delivery, and order forms.

Figure 6 – UiPath and Amazon Textract integration.

A connectivity to your AWS account from UiPath Studio needs to be established before using the AWS AI/ML services.

Amazon Scope is another UiPath Studio extension that helps you establish an authenticated connection to your AWS account. It uses an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user-based authentication, creates an IAM user within your AWS account, and assigns the required policies and permissions that specify the AWS resources your robots can access based on your use case.

You can use Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend for addressing NLP and document-based requirements, and Amazon Rekognition for image and video processing.

Once Amazon Scope establishes the connectivity between UiPath and your AWS account, you can call the required AWS AI/ML services endpoint within your process design. Using Amazon Scope, you can write code to integrate with custom built models developed and hosted as endpoints in Amazon SageMaker.

With this integration, the possibilities of bringing in cognitive capabilities on to your UiPath Studio process design are endless.

Automate Faster with Intelligent Automation Solutions

Customers are able to leverage joint use case solutions from UiPath and AWS with prebuilt integrations for accelerating automations in the IT department and in the contact center.

Prebuilt solutions can be leveraged in customer service and contact center automation as well, with Amazon Connect and Amazon Contact Center Intelligence (CCI).

UiPath has a bi-directional integration with Amazon Connect, with an Activity Pack to automate an outbound call via Amazon Connect as part of a workflow. It also has a Connector from the Amazon Connect IVR and Chat capability that directly triggers a UiPath Robot to run a process based on the customer conversation.

For customers leveraging CCI in their contact center, critical AI services such as Amazon Comprehend can be used to detect customer sentiment as part of the prebuilt Activity Packs.

Conclusion

Using UiPath on AWS, robotic process automation (RPA) administrators and RPA developers can deliver and scale a true enterprise-grade end-to-end automation platform.

The results of automation drive business outcomes and KPIs for line of business leaders and executives alike, delivering operational savings and efficiencies, improving customer experience, minimizing risk and ensuring compliance in operations, and increasing employee engagement.

Automating document processing is a great example of this, but the use cases are limitless in all types of industries, from the front to back office.

To get started with UiPath on AWS, use AWS Quick Starts or AWS Marketplace.

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UiPath – AWS Partner Spotlight

UiPath is an AWS Partner and leader in the “automation first” era enabling robots to learn new skills through AI/ML.

Contact UiPath | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace

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