What is Mulesoft RPA?
Product overview.
What is RPA?
RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a technology which can be used to automate combination of repetitive user tasks on a machine to add efficiency to business and let users focus more on the core business function. It's also referred as Software Robotics.
For example:
Baga is a product catalogue manager who on a regular basis discusses the latest updates with C'level stakes as well as other relevant teams, based on which he changes the Pricing and Product details whenever required for smooth functioning of the business in their legacy product management system. Currently business users who manage the Sales website have to regularly download the pricing details from this legacy system, cleanup the data to be imported using Excel and import them into their Sales website.
It's been observed that the process is repetitive, time consuming and sometimes end up with some errors in the data (Not traceable). Apart from it, this also affects the Admin productivity as they have to invest a large time once in a week to accomplish this.
This whole issue can be resolved in a standardised way using RPA automation. Note: This is just an example use-case, more complex processes can be implemented using RPA. For example: Loan Processing, Employee Payroll processing, Read documents/images(OCR) and add data to Salesforce, etc.
Mulesoft RPA:
Mulesoft announced its own RPA service as generally available - Mulesoft RPA. Mulesoft has been named as Visionary for their RPA in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™. Here are some highlights about Mulesoft RPA:
Provides RPA service as part of Mulesoft Automation offering which uses Automation credits for Mulesoft Composer/RPA/both. Which means you can also use Mulesoft Composer in this offering and you are not locked to buy a separate subscription for using it. Only thing that is consumed here is your Automation credits.
Automation Credit: prepaid consumption unit charged upon RPA bot minutes, API calls, & Composer Tasks.
Mulesoft RPA consists of 4 tools:
RPA Manager (Online - for manually designing RPA process - BPMN diagrams (Business Process Model & Notion language), managing and monitoring your automations)
RPA Recorder (Windows software to record user steps/actions and map them into RPA process/BPMN diagrams which can be further opened in RPA process builder)
RPA Process Builder (Windows software for detailing out the data flow and other variables needed to make the BPMN diagrams into actual Workflows. With this you buildout each element in the BPMN diagram)
RPA Bot (Software that is the actual ROBOT of the story that resides on your machine (windows) handled by RPA manager as per the configured RPA process builder workflows).
Currently (2022) as per Mulesoft website, pricing starts from 57K USD/YEAR with 57K Automation credits. Automation credits can further be purchased as required during the subscription term.
Other important notes & tips:
One thing that makes Mulesoft RPA different here is the Financial analysis and Approval processes it provides against each RPA Process Automation you are trying to build. This helps you decide as well as analyse the effectiveness of an RPA automation for a particular business use case.
Using the evaluation tools you can decide whether or not to proceed with RPA automation. It depends on multiple factors like: process time, cost of process, etc.
Each Process Automation goes through a project lifecycle. Everyone has read access to the Process Automation however can be granted special access to users which are assigned on per stage basis.
Once approved a process automation it can be assigned to a user/group of user to further decide its project manager.
Provided that the design phase might run on different machines, make sure the system setups like font sizing, resolution, as well involved software configurations if any are all identical on both the machines. (One with RPA recorder - design and the Other with RPA bot - production).
If you are using RPA recorder, you can merge the BPMN files in the RPA Recorder editor and upon finalising upload to RPA manager and promote it to build phase from designing phase.
BPMN files can be edited in Design phase using RPA manager/RPA recorder tool.
Bonus architect tip: Ever wondered, how can you leverage OpenSource softwares installed on Windows servers with your Enterprise Cloud processes? This is might be your way to go.
Humble Request: I know this would not be a nice idea to add it over here, however, I would request you to not look this or any RPA or hyper automation tools as an alternatives to Employees. Instead, the whole idea of such technologies is to improve Business efficiency and Employee experience.