This content applies solely to Award Management, which must be purchased separately from the Appian base platform. This content was written for Appian 24.2 and may not reflect the interfaces or functionality of other Appian versions. |
AM comes with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. When you configure RPA for your AM solution, you can create robotic tasks that perform repetitive activities based on the rules you define. See the Appian RPA documentation for guidance and examples of how to use robotic tasks to complement your AM solution.
You'll need to perform several setup steps to enable the research process capability. This research process allows end users to submit requests for their vendor research to be completed. The AM solution then uses a robotic task to go to a specific website to look up vendor information and provide it back to the end users when it is done.
This page provides instructions for setting up a new deployment of RPA on your AM solution. You'll need to perform the following steps in order:
Throughout this document, we'll refer to the target environment that the robotic tasks will import into as <site>.appiancloud.com
, for example, your-site.appiancloud.com
.
When following these instructions, note which steps you need to complete in your Appian environment versus which steps you need to complete on your local machine. Also, note that some sections require access to your local machine and Appian environment, so note these sections as you walk through this setup.
Now, let's get started.
If you're deploying a new RPA package to your AM solution version 1.4 or later, follow the steps below.
Note: The deployment steps differ for earlier versions of AM. You can view the documentation for an unsupported version of Award Management by accessing the release notes and downloading a PDF copy of the documentation from the solution's Release History table. See the release history page for more information.
First, you'll need to use your local machine to retrieve and download the AM RPA package from My Appian.
To retrieve the RPA package:
<bot-directory>
.ContractDirectorySearch.zip
: Contract directory robotic task package to import into Appian.GAM-IE11-WebDriver.zip
: The driver package to the robotic task configuration for IE11.In order to use the robotic tasks, you'll need to create a service account and an API key in the Appian Console. Be sure to complete these steps before configuring the RPA console.
Award Management 1.9 introduced a new method of implementing robotic tasks that requires Appian version 24.1 or later. Follow these steps to upgrade your environment if you are on an earlier version. If your Appian environment is on version 24.1 or later, skip this section and continue with Import robotic tasks.
To upgrade your Appian environment:
<site>
and navigate to the RPA Console.https://<site>/rpa-repo/repository/jidoka/
https://<site>/rpa-repo/repository/jidoka-snapshots/
Now you're ready to import the robotic tasks that AM will use to retrieve vendor information.
To import robotic tasks:
<site>
and navigate to the RPA Console.GAM-IE11-WebDriver.zip
file and ensure the Unzip on server checkbox is selected.GAM-IE11-WebDriver
is listed under the Root
directory and has Robotic tasks: icd-robot
.
The results should look like this:
The next step is to update the RPA connected system with the API key generated when you created your service account in Step 2.
To update the RPA connected system:
<site>
and navigate to the Appian Designer.Connection successful
.AM has advanced RPA capabilities for General Services Administration (GSA) research and Small Business Administration (SBA) research. The GSA and SBA research processes allow users to submit a request to complete their vendor research. After the request is submitted, AM uses a robotic task to go to a specific website to look up vendor information in the GSA and SBA library and pulls this information into the solution for end-user access.
To set up the RPA robot, complete the following steps:
AS_AM_POOL_getResearchDetails
pool using the Robotic Pools tab in the Operations Console.Setting Up Robotic Process Automation