[Guest Post] Serra – 1st place winner of RPA League Iași

This is a series of guest blog posts written by the winners of the RPA League Challenge from Iași, Romania that happened on 29th June 2019. The members of the team entirely wrote this content.

Project Description

Once upon a time, an RPA Developer met an Accountant in his race to save humanity and regain dignity for all colleagues. They started working together, and the results were quick and satisfying for all teams. When they grew old enough, they went on a quest to develop themselves and show the world the benefits of using UiPath. In the 12 hours hackathon, the challenge was to create a friendly and catchy robot. They combined their powers and met halfway, not on the coding side and not in the bookkeeping side, but on HR grounds.

Who can use it

Serra, the product of their imagination, proposed an easier way to handle the communication between different departments in a company and is especially useful for the HR and Payroll. Documents and data requests can be miraculously created in PDF format for all users who decide to access Serra depending on their role.

Time-Saving (estimate how much time it takes at the moment for people to do the process and how much time it would take the robot to do it)

In ancient times, one request to the HR department used to take days for completing, checking, validating, approving, and signing the document. Serra can do it with a blink of an eye without complaining, getting tired and leaving its working place.

Technologies used

We wanted to try something different from the usual everyday emails – so they gave the Telegram bot the chance to prove itself. In this way, Serra became a wise Pocket Assistant. Their solution turned out to be the fastest and most comfortable for this moment in time. If needed, the robot can easily work with a WhatsApp or a Messenger bot. 

The secret of the Telegram bot is that all the responses and actions are handled with the help of a Web Server that runs a simple PHP script. A free service provider was added in the recipe while setting up the webhook for the communication between the two components.

Since the time available for development was limited, Sergiu chose to make the integration between the UiPath Robot and the PHP Webserver with a simple HTTP request from the Robot. Serra checks if there are any events to process. In the meantime, Raluca chose to make an animated presentation.

The better way is to connect the Web Server to the UiPath Orchestrator so it can start a process only when required. 

The Web Server returns a list of the events with all the required details. 

The Robot is also connected to Google platforms through GSuite activity. This enables the robot to grab templates saved on Google Drive, modify them and upload the completed documents back so they can be available for the Telegram bot.

This specific activity is also useful for getting the data from a Google Spreadsheet with all the employee info required for this automation. 

And, in this way, the world becomes a better place for us all by saving one sheet of paper from printing at a time. And now we can all live happily ever after!

Print screens

Serra is one step closer to AI as it has a strong personality…sometimes a little bit too strong.

The members of the Serra Team are Sergiu Butnaru and Raluca Gales.

The software robot can be found on UiPath Connect here.