Top 5 Things To Look For When Automating Your Oracle Applications With RPA
Major corporations looking to begin their automation journey select a leading RPA tool and start with a single bot in order to better understand how to set up automations and utilize elements, such as email triggers, OCR for character recognition, and other features.
However, when it comes to Oracle automation, many organizations hit a wall automating these legacy applications or complex Oracle back-office applications, as they have their own set of unique challenges not addressed by leading RPA solutions today.
Although many RPA tools are able to capture Oracle processes, and therefore claim to support “Oracle E-Business Suite”, the real success and ROI of these automations depend on:
1. How easy it is to capture workflows and create automations
2. How secure and stable the Oracle automations are
3. How easy it is to maintain the RPA flows moving forward
Below you’ll find the most frequent complications that arise when automating Oracle applications and how to avoid these common setbacks using AuraPlayer’s specialized tool.
The major challenges in the Oracle RPA lifecycle management are focused in five areas:
- Lengthy process capture
- Error handling
- Time- consuming script bot maintenance
- Dynamic pop-ups/ hidden fields
- Moving between environments/deployment
If you can’t answer YES to all of the following questions, reach out to us to learn how to derive full ROI from your Oracle RPA strategy.
Can you capture automation processes in minutes using a recorder toolbar?
Traditional RPA solutions capture processes through screen scraping or screen image capture functionality. This requires selecting each field individually to add to an RPA workflow diagram, and it can take hours to capture lengthy processes that span dozens of pages and hundreds of fields. For example, creating the automation of a medium-complexity process, such as creating a sales order, took 11 hours with the leading RPA tool and only 8 minutes using AuraPlayer’s UI recording toolbar.
AuraPlayer easily captures the workflow by simply recording an end user who is working in the UI of the EBS system. With only a single click, one can automatically select any input fields, select specific output fields, or choose to select all of them. By using this automated process capture, even the most complex validations, checks, personalizations, and flex-fields are captured easily and quickly.
See our process caputure tool in action:
Can your automations handle dynamic pop-up windows and hidden fields based on personalizations?
Most automation tools are not equipped to handle the dynamic nature of Oracle EBS, and automations are often disrupted by frequent pop-up windows and hidden fields. Because traditional RPA vendors rely on screen scraping and item position, these dynamic issues can affect the flows’ ability to run. In order to prevent these disruptions, one would have to write custom code, account for all the different types of pop-ups, and record what the response would be for each one. AuraPlayer, however, is not affected by dynamic pop-up windows or things of that nature. It automatically handles all the pop-ups in the application using several methods: choosing to ignore all pop-ups, choosing to use a “default” button as a response (such as “OK”), or choosing to abort the recording with the relevant pop–up message. AuraPlayer inherently understands pop-ups and responds to them accordingly, safeguarding your automations and preventing them from stalling or timing out.
Is your automation solution able to return Oracle error messages including error numbers and descriptions in real time?
When errors arise, traditional RPA solutions will freeze and return generic system errors or timeouts, causing a company’s Oracle RPA team to spend hours investigating and resolving issues. However, AuraPlayer, while executing the automations at runtime, starts a forms session on the WebLogic Server. Therefore any error messages, pop-up messages, status bar messages, or FRM messages that occur while running the automation are returned in real-time for easy debugging and immediate error resolution.
Can your automations withstand UI changes from patch installs/versions and other environmental changes?
As traditional RPA automations are reliant on the item location on a page, any variations from routine patches and upgrades will cause the flow to stall or fail with system errors. This can cause risk to production environments and can take many hours to stabilize. The process then needs to be recaptured all over again, causing extensive delays, as the screen scraping process capture is tedious and must be redone for every environment separately. Such maintenance efforts can take hundreds of hours and can offset the productivity gains achieved from the RPA.
Since AuraPlayer’s patented technology is robust to the changing IDs that tend to occur upon patch installations, these flows are not affected and do not require re-recording.
Is it easy to move quickly between environments– from development to staging to production?
When moving RPA flows between environments using traditional RPA tools, each process needs to be recaptured for every single environment. This offsets ROI due to the many hours spent on recapturing the flows, the added risks of trying to capture the exact same process in each environment, and time needed to perform extended QA to validate flows on each environment.
AuraPlayer’s development tool need only be installed on a development machine, and flow recordings can easily move between development, QA, and production by changing a configuration file of parameters and simply swapping out the URL. Additionally, the use cases could also be exported as simple ZIP files for checking in and version control using GitHub, allowing organizations to maintain their scripts with ease.
It’s clear that automating your mission-critical Oracle workflows can bring significant ROI across your organization. But it’s important to make sure that you don’t choose an RPA tool blindly and without the right considerations.
AuraPlayer’s Oracle Bot-Builder is the only automation tool made specifically with Oracle’s technology and complexities in mind. This leads to more stable and performant automations for even the most complex Oracle business processes.
While AuraPlayer can be used as a stand-alone RPA tool, it can also be easily integrated into other RPA frameworks, such as UiPath, Automation Anywhere, and Blue Prism, as a way to safeguard Oracle automations within a larger RPA strategy. Customers using AuraPlayer as a plug-in have reported saving 100s of hours in development time and achieving stability and ROI from their Oracle workflows.
Watch this demo to see our UiPath integration in action:
If you’re looking to automate your Oracle applications with ease and stability — whether as standalone automation or within a larger framework– find out how AuraPlayer can help.
Schedule a call today to discuss your own use cases and business goals. We’ll make sure you’re getting the full ROI from your Oracle RPA.
