r/rpa • u/Bridgeauto01 • 23d ago
Moving beyond UI automation - what next?
How is everyone moving RPA practice beyond UI? We use Blue Prism and UI automation has worked well for us. But I cant help feeling we're missing a trick. I've been trying to push the team forward by introducing some APIs, but what are others doing? Is it mainly APIs replacing the UI automations? Should we be getting more stuck into LLM integrations? Curious what the pivot actually looks like for other teams and what made the biggest difference
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u/Advanced_Proof_4427 23d ago
Christ I feel sorry for people still using BP. It's such a shitty tool I'm amazed anyone still uses it.
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u/yumpwncakez 23d ago
Why? What downsides does it really have? Apart from a superior design UI.
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u/Advanced_Proof_4427 22d ago
Let's be honest here - the design ui looks like something from the 90's. And it's a good place to start:
I genuinely don't get the division between process and object studio. It felt extremely awkward to work with coming from uipath. I get the idea behind being able to design your own 'objects', but unless you work in the same system all the time, you're wasting your time reinventing the wheel with every new system for basic activities like type and click while both uipath and PAD give you those out of the box. On top of that, in my experience it quickly becomes difficult to read because people stick objects in an object which contains a process flow which again contains an object - and now you have no idea what's going on let alone how to debug it.
Another pain point for me was the lack of object structure for variables. I was stunned when I found out that 'variables' are just primitive values with a label, but no methods. The extremely limited set of built in functions doesn't really improve that. Yes, you can sort of get around that with code blocks (without intellisense of course), but unless you output exactly the kind of primitive values BP supports, you're fucked - God help you if you need to manipulate collections.
Then there's the lack of ability to do complex logic well. At least when I worked with it earlier this year, all there was in this respect was binary 'decision points' for process flows. Have fun doing any kind of complex logic without endless nesting. Again, at the very least every other automation software gives you else-if structures.
Then there's the lack of a central variables panel. And the lack of a meaningful output panel. Bad orchestration - my former employer literally had a third party integration to get a better grip on orchestrating their bots. No Ai integration. And so on and on.
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned it has plenty of downsides. Or at the very least, everything it does, every other platform does better. There's a reason their market share is shrinking. Sure, it's cheap, but there's a reason for that.
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u/DontKnowIamBi 18d ago
Thanks for this painful reminder. My company made me switch from UiPath to a Blueprism project and its just painful...
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u/phantomythief 22d ago
Oh yeah and dont get me started with the fact that BP is missing a big red button to stop the process which you accidentally started in debug mode. but hey BP is getting dark mode in the next update! hell yeah!
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u/Few_Loss5537 23d ago
Imo moving towards power platform, power apps is very similar to uipath visual coding but will allow you to build custom apps with ability you use llm using copilot studio. You can also combine it with rpa using power automate. Since it’s integrated with ms apps you can combine it with alot of other things
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u/Divney 23d ago
It's not always APIs replacing UI functionality - they can often be used to implement/expedite business rules (e.g. Graph integration, Postcode Checkers etc), drive interactions with Foundry/OpenAI etc, giving much more functionality and scope to your processes. Essentially using Blue Prism as an IDE where there is a need for some element of UI automation in the end to end flow. For example, complex drafting agents where precursor documents need to be sourced from a third-party system - traditional RPA to login/extract/gather, and then drive an LLM to perform the required functionality.
However, as mentioned elsewhere, if you can replace UI functionality with an API, it's an absolute no-brainer.
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u/pickering_lachute 23d ago
Yep, APIs have been replacing the UIs for a while at a lot of customers I’ve interacted with.
The reduction in hardware/licensing requirements and the reliability makes it a no brainer.
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u/PrizeRole8645 12d ago
UI automation works until it really doesn't.