One-Time Setup: A Cost-Efficient and Safe Way to Automate

In today’s modern, digitally transformed organizations, software robots, or bots, are automating the tedious, mundane work that knowledge workers once did, enabling those workers to perform higher-level tasks. But, unlike the bots, those workers sometimes change roles or leave the company, which can cause problems with usernames and passwords, etc.

Bots are created and deployed to automate a specific process on a specific machine that maps to a certain job category. Users are categorized by the jobs they perform and have a unique ID — their login and password. When a user changes roles or leaves the company, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) admin must update the user’s machine.

In contact enters, front-office, and back-office operations, people change roles often. As a result, their machines must be reset for the new bots that map to the job category. Also in contact centers, users often share devices across work shifts. This requires those devices to have only the bots (and the most current version of the bots) needed for each of those shared users.

A new way to deploy bots

Role-based access control (RBAC) is an excellent way to help maintain data center security, and it can also be used for distributing bots to end users with a simple one-time setup that associates a bot to a role — and even takes care of bot deployment when employees change roles. Your bots are omnipresent no matter where you log in from, and updates to the automations are equally seamless.

In Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019, users have the option to associate attended bots to roles without having to identify users or devices at the time of setup (see Figure 1). That means when a user logs in to the Bot Agent in Enterprise A2019, the attended bots will be automatically downloaded to the device if they’re not already in the cache. If the user shifts to a new device, the bots move with that user, and any updates to the bot are automatically propagated.

This reduces cost by requiring only a one-time setup for automation to be made available across a common group of people who are performing similar activities. When a user is removed from a role, the bots associated with that role are automatically removed from the device and are no longer available to that user.

This way of distributing bots also applies to any of the dependencies the bots are using, such as Interactive Forms and similar files that must travel with the bot. Accessing forms for the end user doesn’t require any additional setup cost or services to be installed.

Attended automation use cases

Take the example of a nationwide corporation that has to deliver a certain set of attended automations to its front-office personas across the many geographically distributed branches. This would require individual IT setup cost to download the initial set of automations and, if there are additional modules, another setup every time new modules are added.

In the case of major contact centers, the volume of employee churn is hovering around 30%, according to the U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide 2017. This incurs huge setup costs and imaging of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to accommodate the turnover. When new automations are introduced, reimaging might be required.

The automatic distribution of bots, combined with the lightweight Bot Agent in Enterprise A2019, makes automations available to matching skill sets with a single step — and doesn’t require reconfiguration when new people are added and/or removed from a role. Setup takes just a couple of minutes or less, and users seamlessly receive their automations upon their next login.