Automation in itself is nothing new. It has been around ever since the invention of machines that work for us. The scale at which we can automate is always increasing, though. The updates UiPath announced today for its platform are clear evidence of this. We’ll walk through some of the main updates in this article.
Scaling is without a doubt the theme of the updates in UiPath Platform 21.4. The company, founded in 2005, is one of the ‘hottest’ in IT in the past years, culminating in the recent IPO. It has been operating in our region since 2018. In the first conversations we had with UiPath it was mainly about the phenomenon of RPA and what you can do with it. In the meantime, the scope of the company’s vision has clearly broadened. It is now more generally about automation. Of course, that still involves a hefty dose of RPA, which is after all the basis of UiPath. Yet the emphasis is no longer so much on that. It is clearly on the bigger picture, automation in general.
Large-scale management and governance
Today, then, as mentioned, it’s time for UiPath Platform 21.4, the platform on which everything the company does runs. The first major update has to do with being able to manage and set up your automation on a large scale. The new Automation Ops, a SaaS application, allows admins to quickly set up policies for both developers and users within (large) organizations. The idea is that this will allow you to keep a better overview during a large rollout of UiPath Studio products and RPA bots.
Automation Ops is part of UiPath Automation Cloud and available to customers immediately. The goal is to roll it out organization-wide, to allow IT to set things up in a centralized manner. According to UiPath, however, it also contains sufficient flexibility to create policies for different groups of people within the organization. Think of groups with different knowledge levels and / or access rights.
Search and find automation opportunities
Artificial Intelligence has been in the UiPath Platform for quite some time. If you want to automate as an organization, this is important, because it gives you a faster understanding of where the opportunities are in this area. However, version 21.4 of the platform now includes a new solution called Task Mining. This uses ML models to discover patterns in tasks and determine what is repetitive and can therefore be automated. UiPath further stresses that this will not affect employees’ tasks.
In addition to Task Mining, UiPath has also integrated new process mining tools into the Automation Hub. These also allow users to more quickly discover opportunities to automate within the processes that organizations have.
Insights in performance
In addition to the two relatively major announcements Automation Ops and Task Mining, UiPath Platform 21.4 has a good number of new features. For example, the UiPath Automation Cloud has gained many new services, tools and capabilities. These are aimed at providing more choice to users, UiPath says in the press release we received. There are now even more options available in terms of migrating, building, managing and measuring cloud-based automation at scale. The idea of Automation Cloud is that it ensures that your software robots are easily scalable. This is offered without imposing any infrastructure or management requirements on customers.
Ultimately, you also want to be able to keep a close eye on how everything is going in the cloud. That’s why UiPath Insights is now part of Automation Cloud. This will not only allow you to see how your bots are performing, but you can also keep an eye on the ROI of automation projects organization-wide, for example.
Better user experience
The final piece of news surrounding UiPath Platform 21.4 is that the company has further improved the UX of the UiPath Platform. UiPath has always been quite user-friendly, we can recall from conversations we had over the years, and demos we saw. There’s always room for improvement, though. Specific issues around UX are not mentioned by UiPath in the press release. The improvements are meant to simplify and at the same time increase the use of the platform. It should not matter whether you are a citizen developer or a hardcore developer. The updates around UX should also ensure that non-developers can get more out of the platform. Think, for example, of IT staff and data scientists. All of this, of course, based on the assumption that a better user experience leads to faster adoption and fewer support calls to the helpdesk.
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