Automate and integrate processes on the desktop to reduce errors and to give your staff more time to focus on higher-value, customer-oriented tasks.

By using Pega RPA to create attended automations, you can:

• Synchronize all your desktop applications with customer account information.
• Automatically launch or close applications on the desktop.
• Send updated customer account information from your Pega Platform™ application to one or more web or desktop applications.
• Streamline user workspaces. By automating communication among various desktop applications, users do not need to switch among several applications to update information.

For example, customers can submit a request to change their account information in your application. Automation can retrieve customer account information from an application that is running on a case worker's desktop and display it in an application form. Another automation can send the updated account information from your application to the case worker’s desktop application.

This article covers the following topics:

• Automation development
• Methods for integrating automations with your application
  • Flow action integration
  • Data page integration

Automation development

Use Pega Robot Studio to create automations that are integrated with your Pega application. The automation developer must configure the Robotic Activity with the following information:

• Case type class
• Robotic activity name
• All fields required to get or set data as part of the automation.
  All the names must match those from the Flow action or Data Page.

For example, your Pega application might contain fields that users can edit and whose values you want to send to the automation to fill other fields. The automation receives the required values (for example, First name, Last name, and Email address), and then feeds the information to all the required applications that are running on the desktop, performs the required steps and gets the required fields from these applications (for example, Credit Score and National Insurance Number). These fields must be marked as relevant records.

Fields that you add in Case Designer or Data Designer are automatically marked as relevant records. You can also add other fields (properties) that were created in Designer Studio on the Relevant Records landing page.

For more information, see Marking records as relevant records.

After the Pega Robot Studio developer specifies a class name, the automation retrieves the fields that are marked as relevant records, and the developer can select which of those fields are to share. You can share scalar data only between your application and automation.

For more information, see Configuration of robotic automation for Pega Platform applications.

Methods for integrating automations with your application

You can source automations in your application through flow actions or by means of data pages.

Flow action integration

Use the flow action method to automatically collect information from a legacy system before displaying it to the user by means of a preprocessing action. You can also retrieve information from a user before sending it to the automation logic for further processing in other applications through a postprocessing action. The following figure shows the flow action method and the preprocessing and postprocessing actions:

This figure shows the following activities:

A - Running an automation to update the user address.

B - Forwarding the data to other applications in the system.

Preprocessing automations

You can run automations from a flow action to retrieve information from an application that is running on a user's desktop and display that information in a window in your application.

In an example Pega Customer Service application, when a customer service representative (CSR) accepts a call from a customer, an automation runs on the CSR's desktop. The automation retrieves the customer information (for example, the address, name, phone number, and so on) from a legacy application that is running on the CSR's desktop and displays the account number and related information in Pega Customer Service.

Postprocessing automations

You can run a postprocessing automation to send information that users enter in your application to the applications that are running on the user's desktop.

For example, a postprocessing action can send the updated address to another application running on the CSR's desktop. In another example, a customer can dispute a transaction in your application. A postprocessing action can send such dispute details as the transaction name or dispute reason to a legacy application.

Data page integration

You can also source your automation from a data page in your application. Data pages provide automatic access to data by populating page and page list properties with relevant data, depending on the circumstances and your business use case. 

For example, you can configure your automation to pull the customer FICO score from another application. The automation can load the score onto the data page and then populate fields in the CSR’s application.

See the following figure for example:

This figure shows the following activities:

A - Configuring the data page by defining your data model and the edit mode.

B - Selecting Robotic desktop automation as the automation source and specify the automation activity ID for the robot to invoke. This value must match the ActivityName in the Robot Activity form in Robot Studio.

C - Mapping data into the robot by using the request transform. Map outputs back to your data model by using the response transform.

In the preceding example, the automation pulls the customer’s FICO score from a legacy application and loads it onto the data page. Then, the data populates the CSR’s screen through a UI request, as shown in the following figure: