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I am Test Automation engineer and recently got opportunity to explore RPA tool blueprism. After exploring I found it similar to UI automation tools supporting various technologies. Can anyone tell me what value RPA adds compare to traditional tools. I was interested to see how it can use 'intelligence' but couldn't find any feature.
Can expert in this forum help me understand what RPA can do which traditional tool can not do ?
I see similar questions but they do not give any answers I am looking for.
Thanks,
Nilesh
The technological challenges of RPA and automation tools are quite similar. RPA and testing products differ in their user experience and reporting. While testing tools often offer features to assess risk or create testing data, RPA tools have bigger focus on bot creation and user data storage.
The main difference between the two very similar techniques Test (Process) Automation and Robotic Process Automation is the Goal. Almost all the points contained in the previous posts are, in my modest opinion, consequences of the goal of both techniques:
With a Test (Process) Automation tool you want to test an application or system under test. I.e.: Want to find bugs or to prove that the quality of the application has reached a certain level. The Test Process Automation will in general run in a test environment. If something goes wrong with your test automation code or tool breaking completely down the test environment, it is not that bad: You can reset the environment and have not hurt anyone.
With a RPA tool you want to implement a real life business process. The robot works in a productive environment. If something goes wrong you may really hurt someone, i.e. damage productive data or environment. The robot does the work of a user, not just simulates it. Therefore, the robot must be "save". It must also be possible to understand what the robot exactly did with the job it got.
I hope, this help to clarify.
PS: I include the word "Process" in the context of testing, because initializing or resetting a test environment, providing secondary data, booting a system under test, running a test, collecting results, comparing actual with expected results, creating reports for test management or DevOps is usually a process you automate using some kind of "Test Process Automation" not just Test Automation.
on a less official and serious note, RPA is a marketing term for a Test Automation Robot pumped up with some kind of a Workflow Editor and some remoting Technologies
We were using standard Test Automation Robots(UFT, Selenium etc) to do some RPA with the backlash that the automated workflow was rather coded than visualized and we had to have some effort invested into the infrastructure to support scaling. (launching them en-masse and automatically)
What does it solve?
- As mentioned above, visualising worfklows and scaling - although here it has limitations
What are the weak points?
The Test Automation Robot wrapped inside the RPA can be very limited - in many cases they are less mature than state of the art TA Robots.
The promise of record & replay and drag & drop your workflow. As always - we are not yet there
It solves a problem in a way it shouldn't be solved; The GUI is for the user the APIs are for the software (or call them robots in this case). These problems should be solved by writing integrations between systems or extending existing APIs (safer, cheaper, much more reliable etc)
RPA platforms provide you a singular place where various different type of applications can be automated.
These platforms fundamentally will try to consolidate and formalize the automation effort in an enterprise. and here the word "enterprise" is key.
for small businesses where they want to automate some task/s the intern can be asked to quickly build up something. no one cares what technology or tools were used. maybe he likes python, and someone else likes VBA. so a single task may be automated using several different technologies. no one cares as long as it works. the intern leaves and the next intern figures something new...
RPA platforms on the other hand are a larger "formal" effort that will try to automate tasks that otherwise require a lot of FTE (full time employee) count to accomplish. typical RPA use cases are repetitive tasks that humans are doing all day without using much brain. think of extracting each line item from a PO (purchase order) and putting it in an excel spreadsheet and then posting it on some internal application. now imagine a single guy doing this maybe for 100s of POs a day.
You cannot imagine how uneven the IT landscape in most of the enterprises is. old applications that were either built in house a long time ago or versions that arent being updated by the vendor any more. the bigger problem is when these applications do not have any integration points, so these RPA platforms provide the lease invasive (changes to old applications or upgrading even)
i can go on all day about RPA, do let me know if you have any follow up qns. i work for one of these RPA platforms, maybe i will be able to help.
There are many flavours of RPA.
Blueprism is not an ideal example of what modern RPA should look like, consider checking out Automation Anywhere or UiPath (both offer Community Edition you could download and try for free).
While technological differences may not be that vast (and indeed RPA vendors are now looking at test automation as a market for their products), biggest differences are in the ways the platforms are engineered, to name a few:
Security-oriented approach, RPA platform is designed to make sure it could handle important data responsibly.
Design for ease of use for non-technical people. Selenium is great but you need to know how to program to use it. UiPath requires easy drag-and-drop for the same things.
Working with unstructured data inputs, like OCR'ing documents and acting on them
ML integration, for decision making or extra capabilities. E.g. NLP stuff, sentiment analysis, helping OCR recognize new document formats etc.5. Integration with third-party like chat bots or BPM
Analytical and monitoring capabilities, to make sure that you know how long your bots take to do their work and to help them if they fail
Easy of use should not be discarded:
With RPA it's a half an hour job to receive a request by mail, take data from SAP, build pivot in Excel and upload to a website in JSON format. Could you do that in other tools? Sure! Is that as easy? Usually no.
So you could do poor man RPA with Selenium or AutoIT or bash or PowerShell, it will just be not as easy and will provide less capabilities while requiring more effort every step of the way. And if you do it properly you'll end up replicating one of the RPA platforms anyway.
Also in RPA there is usually but not always central coordination mechanism (ala Selenium Grid) to orchestrate several robots (up to 10k in UiPath case) to make sure they act in sync, have some sort of work queue, shift their workload, deploy processes to them etc. This makes all the difference for enterprise usage scenarios.
RPA and UI Automation tools have some technical features that intersect. For example;
UI Component utilization: These tools may utilize a UI screen image-based approach, OS platform frameworks (i.e. Microsoft Accessibility Frameworks), or technology-centric platforms extension (i.e Chrome or Firefox extension)
End-2-End application driving: These tools have the capabilities to drive applications to complete their duties. For example, log in to an application and get some data and shift to other legacy applications and enter data.
Screen scraping: These tools have screen scraping features to retrieve some data on screens there other techniques are not applicable.
3rd party application integration: Also these tools can integrate web services or databases to get data and use these in their application usage scenarios.
...
As you see lots of features these RPA and UI Automation tools share. But, the main concept is here not technology but application methodology. In this point of view, RPA Tools
Designed to drive real-life business flow in the production environment.
May have some cognitive power to complete human-exhibit tasks (i.e. document analysis, high OCR capability, pattern recognition)
Can work attendant and unattended
Doesn’t require any programming language knowledge. That non-technic staff can easily use and learn.
Contrast to below: for implementing complex flows, gaining scalability, achieve seamless integration to Third-Party application, and native integration of external technology into your business flows (i.e. third party microblog sentence classification A.I. library that you developed your own) Some RPA tools (Voodoo RPA) have their own Embedded Development Environment (EDE) for programmers.
Invented for doing the high-value repeatable task in 7/24 in reliable and secure manners
Enhanced workflow management, impersonation, and logging capabilities
In sum, RPA tools developed to easily implement high-volume repetitive tasks in a business environment but UI automation developed to test the application's UI and verify business rules suited for the baseline paradigm.
The main difference is a type of task we can automate using traditional
automation and RPA:
Traditional automation is mainly used to automate test cases of applications/products.
RPA is mainly used to automate business processes.
If we talk in terms of coding knowledge then traditional automation required more coding knowledge in comparison to RPA.
Traditional automation can either support desktop app automation or web app automation at a time without integration of 3rd party
tools. whereas RPA can support both web and desktop app automation.
My company runs a couple of B2B apps (written in Rails) dealing with parts and inventory and we've been trying to figure out the best way to integrate with some of our bigger users. We already offer the REST-style API that comes with Rails, but that, of course requires an IT Department on their end to decide to integrate it, so we'd like to lower that barrier if possible.
From what we've found, most of them are on SAP systems. Now, pretty much all I know about SAP is it's 1) expensive, 2) huge, 3) and does everything and anything you could ever need for your gigantic business to run. Naturally, this is all a bit imposing, and the resources on the site are a cross between impenetrable buzz-word laden sales material, and impenetrable jargon laden advanced technical material with little for the new, but technically competent user to be able to sink his teeth into.
So what I'm wondering is: as a 3rd party, that's not running a SAP installation, is there a way for us to offer access to our site's data through a web service or other API? Is it just a matter of providing or implementing a certain WSDL (and what would that be)? Is this feasible for someone without in-depth experience with SAP? Or is this a complete non-starter?
I'd say it's not possible without someone who knows the SAP system. You probably won't need to hire someone with in-depth SAP knowledge, but at least for the initial implementation, you'll need both the knowledge and a working system you can develop against. Technically speaking, it's not really that hard, but considering the fact that SAP systems are designed to handle multiple organizations, countries, legal systems, localizations and several thousands of users simultaneously, things are bound to be a bit more complex than almost any other software around - and most of the time not even bloated, it's just easy to get lost in that kind of flexibility.
My recommendation would be to find a customer (or a prospective customer) who has someone in their IT department with the necessary technical and processual knowledge and who is interested in conducting a development project. This way, you'd get access to a real system (testing of course) and someone who can explain to you the basics of the system. But, as I said, be prepared for complexity.
vwegert makes some excellent points.
As to this part of your question:
So what I'm wondering is: as a 3rd
party, that's not running a SAP
installation, is there a way for us to
offer access to our site's data
through a web service or other API? Is
it just a matter of providing or
implementing a certain WSDL (and what
would that be)?
Technically it is possible to expose any of your system's services as web-services to a client's SAP system. In order to do this you do not need any prior knowledge of SAP. (SAP should be able to import a WSDL, although there may be some limitations in the earlier pre-ECC5 systems).
For example a service that provides meter reads, airport departure schedules, industry trends etc is not dependend of what is in the user's system or how they set it up. However as soon as there is a need to initiate updates to the client system's data is when you need access to more specialised SAP knowledge.
Also note that many SAP functions can also be exposed as web services, but generally you do need someone with SAP (ABAP) knowledge to do this.
The ABAP language is actually fairly simple, but there is a huge learning curve to understand the data model and the myriad of configurable options in SAP.
I'm wondering if anyone is currently utilizing Microsoft's Master Data Services? How you are utilizing it? Whether you find it useful? When you believe it would be useful? Thanks!
I have been working with MDS since it was first released as part of a feature pack for SQL Server 2008 R2. While MDS has some compelling features - most notably detailed data lineage, I am not confident in recommending it to clients yet.
My reason for this hesitation is the nature of the install and the tendendency to fail on upgrade or system change. I struggled mightily with the both the SQL Server 2012 RC0 MDS and the RTM installs. There are simply too many brittle aspects of the install (such as the hard requirement that the service be installed on a domain-joined machine and the need to install the Silverlight 5.0 SDK for the client to work properly). I also experienced flakiness in the the Excel add-in.
I see where Microsoft is going and I think the product will eventually be useful. Considering it's purpose (master data repository), MDS must be more 'rock solid' before I would use it in production.
We aren't using it currently in our office, however the presentation Microsoft did in town a while back seemed very interesting. I saw it as sort of a competitor to Oracle's OBAW warehouse. You've probably already looked at these, but Microsoft has a decent set of webcasts that cover how to install and use MDS out here:
http://www.msdev.com/Directory/SeriesDescription.aspx?CourseId=155
I'm anxious to see if anyone else is using it as well, we tend to have a hard time talking our management into letting us try these types of services without being able to point to other corporations that have successfully implemented said product.
We're just starting to investigate the use of MDS to support our consulting practice, specifically around data analytics and ETLs to deduplicate, standardize, and sanitize client data. It's probably just scratching the surface of MDS, but we were led to MDS initially for its inclusion of regular expression capabilities in SQL to transform free-form text data.
Before MDS/DQS, part of the sustainability / enduring-success of a custom database application was heavily dependent on one or both of the following items...
Having a full-time technical resource to manually update the master data. Someone who can work with the Business Experts and make the necessary adjustments to the data in the database.
Developing (in addition to the database/application/etc) a custom UI that is intuitive enough for the less-technical Business Experts to use for managing the master data themselves.
Neither of these were ideal from a cost-perspective. With MDS/DQS, a developer/contractor can come in, design an end-to-end Data Warehouse/BI solution including full integration with DQS/MDS (probably via SSIS packages) with relative ease. The Business-Experts can be trained to manage the master data using a UI they are already very familiar with (ex. Excel), and the developer/contractor can move on to the next project/client.
Also, if the business already has other data sources (via acquisitions or silo'd-yet-overlapping efforts or whatever), MDS can be used to manage all the master data in one centralized location.
It might not be the best MDS product available yet however it does come with SQL Server. Compared to most of the bespoke efforts for accommodating meta-data or master data in warehouse loads it's a pretty good option since most of the time is spent concentrating on the warehouse and the mastering of ancillary or other data isn't normally well accommodated for leaving questionable results. I prefer to use it than create some other flaky option that the customers will find it difficult to maintain. If you have budget however I would consider looking around for something more polished.
Like anything though give master data the respect it deserves. If it is going to be used then it's worth spending the time to model the entities, flow of data and usage correctly. The data stewards will need to savvy and will require training (it's not the most usable interface in the world - to say the least).
As we are a small consulting and development company we don't use MDS internally but we do implement it at customers with a focus on managing the Golden Record as the customers have a myriad of databases and applications all using the same data (customer, product …)
I agree with Lynn Langit's comment about installation and SilverLight dependency and the general comments about the UI. There are also a lot of smaller companies that don't run SQL Enterprise Edition but whom could benefit from MDS.
Those are the reasons why we are now developing a modern web application which we will host for our customers (probably on Azure).
If you're thinking about MDS I'd recommend to have a look at the API to replace (parts) of the UI.
Master Data Service is very useful for managing Master Data,
We have used Master Data Services 2012 and 2016, there are not too many features present in 2012 ,2016 is much better than 2012 with some new features , but I think still Microsoft needs to improve Master Data Services, they should include some flexibility in business rule's area.
Is there anyone out there that used these two technologies and could give me some comparison in the form of advantages and disadvantages of both? I'm currently working with BO and I have heard that open source Pentaho does pretty good job as well.
Thanks in advance!
Pentaho is a full-fledged BI suite, meaning it can handle everything from reports, OLAP, dashboards, etc.
I've only briefly dealt with the reporting side of BO, but I haven't looked to any other systems since starting to work with Pentaho three years ago. It's a very powerful system (and FOSS). There's also a very vibrant and active community. Being FOSS, Pentaho also encourages the community to contribute back. Some recent examples of this are Saiku (previously called Pentaho Analysis Tool; 1.0 is around the corner, already usable as a plugin into the BI server) and the Community Dashboard Framework (which is now a core component of the suite).
The best suggestion I can make is to download the test server from Sourceforge and start playing with the toolset. It's free, so there's no trial expiration to worry about.
Pentaho also provides support packages for both individual components and the full suite. The last time I checked the prices, it was like $2.5k for a component and $10k for up to 10 developers on a single server.
With Business objects you created Universes which are a subject oriented semantic layer on a data base. You do that with BO Designer. These universes are then used with the reporting tool by just grabbing the objects in the semantic layer. The thing is that as the Universe contents a subject oriented semantic, any user knowing the subject can easily create a report by dragging and dropping the elements of the Universe within the report. No need to know sql. Users, reports and Universes are then managed in a repository where you can defined endless combinations of security between all of it. The reporting and the security management can be done via a web app.
Additionally, you have BODS which is the ETL tool that enables the creation and feeding of the reporting databases/data warehouses/data marts/EIS/ODS/.......
There are other tools which a didn't use. I've just used BODS (ETL), BO DESIGNER (Universes), DESKTOP INTELLIGENCE (reports) and the Central Management Console (CMC) for security.
Cheers
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What are SAP and ABAP? I searched and got a bunch of different acronyms that don't quite make sense.
Is SAP a database engine?
Is ABAP a programming language?
Or are they nothing of that nature?
What are they primarily used for?
I have worked with SAP since 1998. SAP is a type of software called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that large companies use to manage their day to day affairs. On the macro, the software can be split into two categories: Technical and Functional
Let's go Technical first, as it answers the "What is ABAP" part of your question.
Technical
There are two technical "stacks" within the SAP software, the first is the ABAP stack which is inclusive of all the original technology that SAP was. ABAP is the proprietary coding language for SAP to develop RICEFW objects (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Extensions, Forms and Workflows) within the ABAP stack.
The ABAP stack is traditionally navigated via Transaction Codes (T-Codes) to take you to different screens within the SAP Environment. From a technical perspective, you will do all of your performance and tuning of the WORK PROCESSES in the SAP system here, as well as configuring all of the system RFCs, building user profiles and also doing the necessary interfacing between the OS (usually Windows or HPUX) and the Oracle Database (currently Enterprise 11g).
The JAVA stack controls the "Netweaver" aspect of SAP which encapsulates SAP's ability to be accessed via the Internet via SAP Portal and it's ability to interface with other SAP and non-SAP legacy systems via Process Integration (PI).
SAP also has extensive capabilities in the Business Intelligence Field (BI) by accessing information stored within the Business Warehouse (BW). Currently, there is a new technology called HANA 1.0 that compresses the time to run reports against these repositories.
There are two primarily technologists that run ALL of these functions, they are called SAP Basis (Netweaver) Administrators and ABAP Developers.
Functional
SAP has specific pre-populated functional packages for different business areas. For example, Exxon runs the "IS Oil & Gas" package while Bank of America runs the "Banking" package, while further still Lockheed Martin runs the "Aerospace & Defense" package. These packages were developed over time by the amalgamation of intelligent functional customizations that could be intelligently ported to the system via inclusion in dot releases.
However, there are some vanilla functional modules that almost all entities run, regardless of their specific industry:
HR: Human Resources
PM: Project Management
FI: Financial
CO: Controllers
MM: Materials Management
SD: Sales and Distribution
PP: Production Planning
and finally the biggie:
MDM: Master Data Management which encapsulates the data for customer/vendor/material etc.
SAP is a company and offers a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, business platform, and the associated modules (financials, general ledger, &c).
ABAP is the primary programming language used to write SAP software and customizations. It would do it injustice to think of it as COBOL and SQL on steroids, but that gives you an idea. ABAP runs within the SAP system.
SAP and ABAP abstract the DB and run atop various underlying DBMSs.
SAP produces other things as well and even publicly says they dabble in Java and even produce a J2EE container, but tried-and-true SAP is ABAP through-and-through.
Attempt to provide simplified explanation:
SAP
Firstly it is a product.
Owner company, derives its name with the product name "SAP"
It is a management system (i.e. referred as ERP). Which means, this is a tool used for "managing the system" (domain specific - finance etc.).
Now, that SAP has created an environment around SAP. In order to operate in SAP environment (i.e. for customisations etc.), language-abstraction was required. Here comes ABAP.
ABAP
It is a language (high level), which is used in the SAP environment for customisations or new feature implementations.
It is high-level, because, it is known only in SAP environment.
Therefore, any customisation on the basic version of SAP given to some customer of SAP would require ABAP usage, otherwise, just delivered SAP is good enough for usage (i.e. no ABAP required).
Now is another term HANA.
HANA
This is an in-memory RDBMS.
Another tool/product by SAP, you would say, and its prime focus is to facilitate "analytics".
The way, this is designed, gives high compression (column-wise storage) and hence is majorly used for "READ" operations, which is why it is associated with "analysis".
SAP and HANA together abstracts the underlying complexity of database-access queries and UI (developed in java), together, to make the user experience good for the management system (used majorly in analytics, and so that the main focus stays in analytics). This very specific tool/product, is said as "technology", as it has an environment of its own (terminologies etc.). ABAP facilitates further development of the SAP-ERP.
The underlying development is in C, C++ (and ABAP) for SAP.
SAP SE is a German multinational that makes enterprise software. It is best known for SAP ERP and its predecessors (SAP R/2 & SAP R/3). As the name suggests, SAP ERP is an ERP system, which basically means that it supports a wide range of business processes from warehouse management and sales to HR, business intelligence, etc.
Although SAP ERP isn't the only software sold by SAP, people are typically refering to SAP ERP when they say "they're using SAP at work". It's important to note, though, that SAP is the name of the company and no software is sold or licensed as just "SAP".
ABAP is a 4GL programming language created by SAP, and commonly compared with OpenEdge ABL or COBOL. Much of SAP's software is written in ABAP. SAP provides an ABAP Workbench, which is a collection of tools that allows third party developers to develop, test and run custom ABAP programs within the SAP ERP system. The ABAP Workbench is typically used only when business logic cannot be implemented in SAP ERP by means of mere configuration.
with SAP, you might be referring to a popular business software:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG
And according to Wikipedia, ABAP is a programming language (short for Advanced Business Application Programming) created by SAP AG.
In addition to all the regular confusion around SAP issues might also stem form the fact that SAP used to have their own DBMS ..
It used to be called Adabas (marketed originally by Nixdorf and then by Software AG) and was a quite popular DBMS for smaller SAP (the ERP solution) installations in Germany. At some point (AFAIK around 2000) SAP started to co-develop/support/take over Adabas and marketed it as SAP DB and later MaxDB under commercial and open-source licenses. There also was/is some agreement with MySQL.
But when people talk about SAP, they usually refer to the ERP solution as the other posters have noted.
SAP is just a company name and Abap or Abap/4 is a language programming. SAP company has a lot of products: ERP(material, sales, costs, financial), CRM, SRM, SCM and all of them are customizing and programmed with ABAP and Java. Basically is it.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG.
In short, SAP is a modular based application that sits on top of a database (as many applications do). Many people mistake SAP as being a database, but in fact it is just the application.
By 'modular based application' I mean that 'SAP Netweaver' is a bit like 'Microsoft Office' in that it is an application or set of applications that contains many components/modules. With SAP you can add modules (such as Finance, HR, Banking, Logistics, etc.) to meet your business requirements.
ABAP is a bespoke programming language that is used within SAP. SAP also now has components that are purely ABAP based, purely JAVA based or a mixture of the two. SAP can also integrate with other technologies such as .net and PHP.
SAP is really a big Company that offers incredible solutions oriented to medium-large companies.
Actually, I can say that the main IT products are: ERP, WEB, Human Resources, Integration, BI, Reports, Machine Learning, Mobile, Cloud, Robotics, and so on.
On the cloud, you can even find solutions using Cloud Foundry, NodeJS, HTML5, Java, etc.
It's really huge the solutions that offers to their customers.