Introduction

Robotic Workforce Manager (RWM) is built on Appian's low-code platform and is as flexible as any application developed in Appian. In order to make sure your application remains scalable and aligns with best practices, this page guides you through some of the most common changes.

This guide intends to provide expert Appian designers with the best practices, guidelines, and recommendations for configuring RWM.

Recommended customization

In the Control Center, on the Exceptions page, you can view statistics around business exceptions. Because business exceptions vary from organization to organization based on the Business Process Management (BPM) Appian processes created, the situations that generate business exceptions, as well as the content, can vary significantly. Thus, customization is necessary to display these exceptions.

Creating a business exception process

RWM includes a business exception sub-process example described below to provide a standard process and case management interface. However, you aren't required to use this process for a business exception, as any process will work.

The following objects will be modified:

• RWM_closedBusinessExceptions
• RWM_FM_BusinessExceptionCollection
• RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_LIST

To create a new business exception process:

1. Duplicate the following objects, but update their name and contents (if a constant object) to be specific to your business process:
   • RWM Business Exception Template
   • RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_TEMPL
   • RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_CASE_TITLE_TEMPL
   • RWM_FM_businessException
   • RWM_buttonLayoutForBusinessException
   • RWM_RD_businessException
   • RWM_PM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_CASE_MANAGEMENT (populate this with process model duplicated from RWM Business Exception Template)
2. Add the value of the duplicate of RWM_BUSINESS_EXCCEPTION_NAME_TEMPL to RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_LIST
3. Add the RWM Business Exception Initialization process model as a subprocess call to an Appian process that encounters the business exception.
4. Add the following inputs into the subprocess node:
   • businessExceptionId: the unique identifier of the business exception case, which should be a foreign key to an ID of a separately created business exception table.
   • businessExceptionName: pass in the constant duplicated from RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_TEMPL.
   • caseTitle: pass in the constant duplicated from RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_CASE_TITLE_TEMPL.
5. Open your interface rule duplicated from RWM_FM_businessException, and update the section that contains text Custom Template with your business exception's page contents. You can fetch necessary details using businessExceptionId in the caseDetails input.
6. Replace rule RWM_buttonLayoutForBusinessException with your duplicate of it. Create local variables if extra values need to be stored from the previous step, and pass those into this this duplicate of RWM_buttonLayoutForBusinessException.
7. In your duplicate of RWM Business Exception Template, set as parameter process variables any variables that are needed from the duplicate of RWM_FM_businessException.
8. You can optionally add in extra nodes for any additional operations.
9. In your duplicate of RWM_buttonLayoutForBusinessException, update the process model constant in a!startProcess with your constant duplicated from RWM_PM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_CASE_MANAGEMENT, and input any values that are parameters of your duplicate of RWM Business Exception Template.
10. Update RWM_FM_BusinessExceptionCollection with the interface duplicated from RWM_FM_businessException in the bottom array, the third parameter of displayvalue, passing in any relevant inputs, and the constant duplicated from RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_TEMP in the top array, second parameter of displayvalue.
11. Repeat the changes made to the duplicate of RWM_FM_businessException in the duplicate of RWM_RD_businessException.
12. Update RWM_closedBusinessExceptions with the interface duplicated from RWM_RD_businessException in the bottom array, the third parameter of displayvalue, passing in any relevant inputs, and the constant duplicated from RWM_BUSINESS_EXCEPTION_NAME_TEMP in the top array, second parameter of displayvalue.

You have now created a custom business exception that is tailored to your organization's process and will appear in the exceptions report!

Automation Planner

In the Automation Planner, Request New RPA Process is a process to request a new RPA automation. Using this feature, the requestor or a member of the CoE can track the specific automation request until the request is taken to production.

The below customizations are possible within the Automation Planner:

• Customizing roles
  • Customizing role name
  • Customizing members
• Customizing status
  • Modifying status name
  • Adding new status
• Adding new approval in workflow

Request new RPA process

The workflow of the RWM core application is illustrated below.

Every organization has its own approval hierarchy to onboard any RPA process. The approval built in this application can be customized as per the Organization needs.

This section describes how to customize the workflow.

Customizing roles

Refer to - Security and Role-Based Access which is fully configurable.

Customizing status

The process has the following statuses for each step in the workflow. These values are mentioned in the constant - RWM_VAL_PROCESS_STATUS and RWM Database - RWM_LOOKUP_STATUS table.

Modifying status name

Adding status

It has three steps:

1. Adding to status list constant
2. Adding to status index constant
3. Adding to the status in RWM_lookup_status table

Adding to status index constant

Adding a New Step in Workflow

This section explains at a high level how to add a new step in the workflow.

1. Adding a new step to the status
2. Updating the Approval Interface

Adding a new step to the status

Refer to the section Adding Status.

Updating the approval interface

The existing interface - RWM_DM_FORM_requestNewRPAProcess is common for the below stages as they have the same content for review:

• Business COE Review
• Technical COE Review
• Budget Approval
• Start Project

The status field in the process input is the driving factor to show the feedback given by the previous approver. For the new stage, the comment section should be added and configured to conditionally shown based on the stage.

General customization

The charts, grids, and dashboards that are part of the Control Center site can be customized in the RWM application.

Customized content will be overwritten while upgrading the application to the newer version. To avoid this:

• If the Appian version is 19.2, DevOps can be used to see the difference between objects in the environments. The new version of the application can be compared with the customized environment.
• It is recommended to make a copy of the existing object (rule/interface/query entity) and make the corresponding changes.

Charts and grids

Dashboards

Items not recommended for customization

These are all the general guidelines for items that should not be customized.

• Do not change the type of any columns in any CDT.
• Do not change any of the CDT names.
• Do not change the type of any columns in any table.
• Do not change any of the table names.
• Do not change the script for any view.
• Do not change the script for any stored procedure.
• Do not change the script for any function.

See Preparing to Upgrade RWM to see whether a specific object can be modified or not.

For general guidelines on customization please refer to Backward Compatible Design: Planning for Subsequent Deployments.

Database support

Customize the RWM application to support Oracle DB apart from MySQL cloud DB.