The Control Center provides useful statistics about your digital workforce and orchestrates your robotic and business process management (BPM) operations. It displays information such as how many processes were automated in a certain period and how many resources and queues are deployed.
The page provides an overview of the different Control Center tabs, including:
You see the Automation page when you open the Control Center. This tab provides the list of automations in Production.
Click on an Automation Name to get further statistics about the automation on the Automation Details page.
The Automation Details page consists of three views - Summary, Onboarding Request Information, and Onboarding Request Lifecycle.
The Summary view provides the Automation Steps details and Average Completion time of different steps.
Users can click on each step in the Description column to see detailed information about that step. If that step is BPM or RPA, then users can see the detailed information about the BPM Process or RPA Process respectively. For AI related capabilities, there is no deep-dive navigation.
The Onboarding Request Information view provides the details of every stage of approval for automation.
The Onboarding Request Lifecycle view provides the collective information of the automation request and will give information regarding all the approval stages.
This tab provides useful statistics about the digital workforce and can be considered the orchestrator of your robotic process automation (RPA).
The RPA Module consists of five key views:
This view shows the following insights:
The Process view provides a bird's eye view of all processes such as the Process Name, the Business Owner and Technical Owner, etc. This screen also allows the users to either start or schedule the Blue Prism, UiPath, and Appian RPA processes from Appian on a real-time basis.
Users can click on the Process Name to get further statistics about the process.
The RPA Process Details page consists of three views - Summary, Audit Logs, and Start/Schedule Summary. The Summary view provides information pertaining to the process sessions, KPIs for sessions count, exception sessions, avg. session time, work item count, avg. work item time, etc.
Users can also start or schedule a process right from the process dashboard.
The start and schedule action appears as shown above. Displayed at the top right is the list of inputs for which the user specifies the values. For the schedule, there is a section in the middle called Configure Scheduler where the user enters the start date, end date, time of schedule, and the days at which it needs to be scheduled.
There are two places where a user could start a process:
Or
Users can navigate to the Start/Schedule Summary view:
This opens up the RPA schedule calendar against the selected process. The calendar shows the various times at which the process is scheduled to run during that month.
A table appears at the bottom of the page that shows the list of processes triggered by Appian (for the current day). The Start History table displays five columns: Started By, Started At, Inputs, Comments, and Status.
The Audit log gives information about the processes that are changed on the RPA vendor side.
The Resource view provides an overview of all the resources (typically runtime machines) along with its current status (active, offline, etc). It also gives statistics about usage.
Click a resource to see further information, such as a total number of sessions executed, the total number of processes executed, the percentage of utilization of the resource in a given period, etc. The percentage utilization of the resource may be an interesting metric for the operations, business, and the IT teams to plan capacity utilization. If utilization at runtime is high, then capacity may have to expand to accommodate future RPA automation requests.
In the Utilization Details table, you can see a breakdown of all the processes that have been executed on the resource in the given time period.
This view provides details about the Blue Prism, UiPath, and Appian RPA queues. It provides basic information such as the name of the queue, the number of work items in the queue, the status of each work item (completed or pending, etc), the amount of time taken for each work item in the queue, etc.
Click a queue to see further information about each item in the queue, such as the resource that executed the work item, the priority, the status of each work item, etc.
The Summary section of the Queue tab shows the number of queues in each status, as described here:
The calendar gives the users the list of all the processes that have been scheduled in Appian as well as in Blue Prism, UiPath, and Appian RPA. You can also filter based on the process categories and the process names. Companies that work across different time zones can toggle between their timezone and the GMT for comparison. Apart from filters, the calendar uses icons to display the real-time status of the schedules.
There are several icons which will be shown in the calendar:
Icon | Description |
---|---|
This is a process scheduled in Blue Prism, UiPath, Appian RPA itself. | |
This is a process scheduled in Appian and waiting to be executed. | |
This was a process scheduled in Appian and executed successfully. | |
This was a process scheduled in Appian and the execution has failed. | |
* | Will be appended to a Blue Prism, UiPath, Appian RPA schedule to indicate that the schedule runs every hour. The time listed here indicates the first occurrence of the schedule. |
** | Will be appended to a Blue Prism, UiPath, Appian RPA schedule to indicate that the schedule runs every minute. The time listed here indicates the first occurrence of the schedule. |
The BPM tab provides a bird's eye view of the BPM process and information such as the process Name, Description, Instance Count, Percent Successful, Avg Processing Time, and Avg Task Time.
Click a BPM process name to get further statistics about the process.
All robotic processes in production have exceptions that come up from robots and humans working together. The Exceptions tab can be used to track all work item exceptions, as well as resource and session alerts that come up within Blue Prism, UiPath, and Appian RPA processes.
The Exceptions tab provides the following benefits when alerts and exceptions occur:
If you're using Appian RPA, exceptions appear automatically in RWM only for robotic processes that take data from a queue as input.
Exceptions fall under either System Exceptions or Business Exceptions.
There are 3 types of system exceptions:
These are automated exceptions that originate from any available RPA vendor configured to work with your environment. These exceptions can include technical issues that a robotic process has encountered, or alerts that a resource has unexpectedly gone offline. These exceptions do not require additional configuration to receive in RWM.
Business exceptions are exceptions and alerts that result from the activities in Appian business processes used as part of automations occurring in the application. These business processes can be designed to capture the range of business relevant activities that fall outside of the capabilities of robotic processes, but are possible within Appian BPM. This includes pulling various users in the organization into the process for comments, reviews, approvals, reconciliation of inconsistent data, as well as automated activities and integrations with external systems. All of these BPM and RPA processes can be seamlessly connected to create an end-to-end automation workflow.
To see your Appian BPM processes appear in the business exceptions list, update expression rule RWM_UTIL_getAlertTasks with constants for your new process models, as well as any additional filters needed. Also update RWM_FORM_exceptionDetails to display the number of business exceptions that occur in the application.
When an exception occurs:
The exceptions that come up are added to a case and assigned to the user automatically, based on a routing table in Appian, which can found in Appian Designer. The object name for the decision table is RWM_caseManagementRoutingDetails. The format of the decision routing tables is as given in the below image.
The last empty entry should not be removed as that's the condition at which the unmatched cases get assigned to the Exception Manager.
Resource/Session Alerts: Apart from exceptions, Resource and Session Alerts tasks can also be found here. These kinds of tasks are assigned to the RWM Exception Managers by default, whenever the status of a resource is changed from Active or Running to either Missing or Offline. An example is shown below.
Assign Cases: Exceptions created on the RPA vendor side by default are assigned to the Exception Manager if they do not have any assignee configured in the decision table as shown in Fig 2.2.4(b). The Exception Case Manager can select assignees from this screen. Assignees are then able to work on the exceptions.
Closed Exceptions: Click Closed Exceptions to see the exception and alerts that are closed.