Alexander Pugh is a software engineer at Albertsons. He has worked in Robotic Process Automation and the cognitive services industry for over five years.This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.Related LinksAlexander Pugh's personal siteEnterprise RPA Solutions
Automation Anywhere
UiPath
blueprism
Enterprise "Low Code/No Code" API Solutions
appian
mulesoft
Power Automate
RPA and the OS
Office primary interop assemblies
Office Add-ins documentation
Task Scheduler for developers
The Component Object Model
The Document Object Model
TranscriptYou can help edit this transcript on GitHub.[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today, I'm talking to Alexander Pugh. He's a solutions architect with over five years of experience working on robotic process automation and cognitive services. Today, we're going to focus on robotic process automation. Alexander welcome to software engineering radio. [00:00:17] Alex: Thank you, Jeremy. It's really good to be here. [00:00:18] Jeremy: So what does robotic process automation actually mean? [00:00:23] Alex: Right. It's a, it's a very broad nebulous term. when we talk about robotic process automation, as a concept, we're talking about automating things that humans do in the way that they do them. So that's the robotic, an automation that is, um, done in the way a human does a thing.Um, and then process is that thing, um, that we're automating. And then automation is just saying, we're turning this into an automation where we're orchestrating this and automating this. and the best way to think about that in any other way is to think of a factory or a car assembly line. So initially when we went in and we, automated a car or factory, automation line, what they did is essentially they replicated the process as a human did it. So one day you had a human that would pick up a door and then put it on the car and bolt it on with their arms. And so the initial automations that we had on those factory lines were a robot arm that would pick up that door from the same place and put it on the car and bolt it on there.Um, so the same can be said for robotic process automation. We're essentially looking at these, processes that humans do, and we're replicating them, with an automation that does it in the same way. Um, and where we're doing that is the operating system. So robotic process automation is essentially going in and automating the operating system to perform tasks the same way a human would do them in an operating system.So that's, that's RPA in a nutshell, Jeremy: So when you say you're replicating something that a human would do, does it mean it has to go through some kind of GUI or some kind of user interface?[00:02:23] Alex: That's exactly right, actually. when we're talking about RPA and we look at a process that we want to automate with RPA, we say, okay. let's watch the human do it. Let's record that. Let's document the human process. And then let's use the RPA tool to replicate that exactly in that way.So go double click on Chrome, launch that click in the URL line and send key in www.cnn.com or what have you, or servicenow hit enter, wait for it to load and then click, you know, where you want to, you know, fill out your ticket for service. Now send key in. So that's exactly how an RPA solution at the most basic can be achieved.Now and any software engineer knows if you sit there and look over someone's shoulder and watch them use an operating system. Uh, you'll say, well, there's a lot of ways we can do this more efficiently without going over here, clicking that, you know, we can, use a lot of services that the operating system provides in a programmatic way to achieve the same ends and RPA solutions can also do that.The real key is making sure that it is still achieving something that the human does and that if the RPA solution goes away, a human can still achieve it. So if you're, trying to replace or replicate a process with RPA, you don't want to change that process so much so that a huma