Anyone using Robotic Process Automation (RPA)---such as UIPath---in their work? If so, can you share what you are doing with it and how you feel about it?

And how does RPA differ from Automator on macOS, if at all?

We use RPA quite extensively currently. We tried UIPath and Workfusion, but the tools themselves became a bottleneck in the long run. Now we have our own lower level RPA tool which everybody likes more. We ditched the drag and drop UI approach and do everything via coding and inhouse RPA libraries.
Use cases are from every part of our organization from Finance and HR to actual product development teams and individual coders.

@rytzpekt Do you have a couple of concrete examples of processes that have been automated in this way? Not dev processes, but from HR or finance maybe?

Processes based on hour tracking system (overspending, underspending, wrong or missing data, resource utilization etc), Internal invoicing (fix data autom. if enough correlative data available and write corrected invoices automatically back to system, tax deduction stuff etc. ), Instruments and laboratory equipment scheduling and allocation (bad utilization is super expensive), onboarding process automation (quizzes, tests and links to material from info sources to chat/email with encouragement and contact info/meetings to mentors)

Those are just few

@rytzpekt Thank you. What language(s) are you using to drive all this?

@platypus Python and Robot Framework

@rytzpekt any updates on your companies use of rpa? Things that went especially good or bad? Thanks

@krz1 No great highlights or bad stuff to give sorry. Basically stuff just works. We refactor our libraries quite a lot, so that helps the development. Failure detection, fallbacks and input data integrity checks have been solid performers and common now to most processes due to refactorings. Techwise things are very simple and almost all problems that seem to need ML, OCR etc. are easily worked around with a process change. Most headaches come when a new tool needs to be introduced and its automation maturity is low compared to the tools we already support. As s developer you just have to be very systematic, prefer boring and simple code and always come back and refactor stuff from processes into libraries.