Core Concepts

This is a kind of dictionary used throughout the context of the documentation, so it is recommended to familiarize yourself with all the terms contained in this document.

Attended RPA - Covers scenarios where decision-making and/or user input is required in the course of robot operation, such as desktop automation. These software robots run on an employee's workstation and are triggered by two situations: a user command and cases where the Robots need input from the user to continue a task. Access is often limited to employees in a specific department or workstation.

Automation design - A plan for implementing RPA in an organization. As part of this plan, companies identify a list of processes that are the best candidates for automation. The project can be a short-term or long-term plan.

Bot - A computer on which operations are performed, usually a human does not use it.

Business intelligence - An organized system of technologies, practices, and applications that help companies collect, analyze and present business-related information.

Business process management (BPM) - The practice of using modeling, automation, and data insights to optimize business activities, enterprise goals, and employee operations.

Command-line interface (CLI) - a way of interacting with a computer program by calling actions with lines of text (command lines) directly in the program.

Computer vision - Technology that enables automation software to recognize and interact with information from images or multidimensional sources that can be used for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition.

Contact Report - a report of the meeting with the customer containing a summary of the findings.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) - A system that enables companies to manage operations such as accounting, project management, and procurement through software packages that allow companies to gain insight into a single database of shared information.

Full-time equivalent (FTE) - The amount of work a full-time employee does in a department or on a specific project.

Hyperautomation - The use of advanced technologies such as RPA, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and process mining to augment the workforce and automate processes in ways that have a much greater impact than traditional automation capabilities.

Industry-specific processes - Processes that are unique to a specific industry, such as fraud claims detection in banking, claims processing in insurance, and bill of materials (BOM) generation in manufacturing.

Job - executed within the workflow instance of a given task (each call within the workflow, will have its job).

Multi-tenancy - Such a way of designing (and implementing an application) that it runs on multiple environments/servers independently. E.g. each server has its own orchestrator, there are different data and users. This is the default way to deploy AnyRobot Portal.

On-premise - customer data is isolated, everyone has this data on their network, it is not publicly available on the Internet, and we are not saas (that all customers use one "cloud").

Pilot program - Deployment that follows an initial proof-of-concept phase to see if the robot will perform as expected under more advanced, complex conditions.

Portal - The orchestrator decides what task, with what content, and on what work to be performed.

Project - A set of tasks under processes (most often there is one project per organization but this is not a rule).

Proof of concept (POC) - A test run of automation to discover its limitations and make sure the robot will work as intended.

RPA Center of Excellence (CoE) - A department within the company established early in the RPA implementation to support the implementation and ongoing deployment of RPA. This team uses RPA tools and technical expertise to identify and manage ongoing RPA implementation. This team should include members from multiple departments across the organization.

RPA roadmap - A plan that comes after the automation design phase and provides companies with guidance on how to achieve RPA goals. This includes a cost-benefit analysis of the processes selected for automation.

Robotic Operations Center (ROC) - A robotics department that specializes in rapid automation and high-quality, low-cost change management. Where the CoE supports early RPA implementation and deployment, the ROC supports existing robots, automates new processes, manages RPA-related security, and performs compliance functions for more mature RPA models. It is a structured department with a defined budget and operational service level agreements (SLAs).

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) - Software robots that mimic and integrate human actions into digital systems to optimize business processes. RPA automation captures data, runs applications, triggers responses and communicates with other systems to perform a variety of tasks.

Runner - an application you install on a Bot that downloads tasks from Portal and executes them. We currently support macOS / Windows and Terminal (i.e. Linux) platforms.

Sandbox - our test server on which the portal is always from the "development" branch.

Schedule - Schedule of execution of a given task.

Screen scraping - Copying data from one application to another using a computer program.

Software robots - instead of the physical robots that populate manufacturing plants - free workers from repetitive, manual work and data entry. These robots interact with applications and systems via a graphical user interface or command-line interface to perform routine tasks.

Studio - Our application with which we can create automation without coding (or by coding very little).

Task - a task/its content/source code file.

Trigger - conditions under which a given task is triggered (e.g. arrival of an email, webhook or a specific time in the calendar e.g. every day at 5 am).

Unattended RPA - Robots that require little or no human intervention to perform actions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year after startup. These robots operate continuously in a batch model that allows for 24/7 automation. The robots can be accessed remotely through a variety of interfaces and platforms, and administrators can view, analyze and implement planning, reporting, auditing, monitoring, and modification functions in real-time from a centralized hub.

Webhook - incoming or outgoing, is any request made from/to an AnyRobot Portal server.

Workflow - A combination of Task (the content of a task) + Trigger (the conditions under which a task occurs, such as every day at 5 a.m.) + other things (such as notifications when a task fails for some reason).

Workflow automation - The use of RPA technology to automate the steps of manual or routine business tasks to improve daily practices, increase employee productivity and allow people to focus on more profitable work.