Digitaltzar

Would love your feedback on the cases and told we built for non-technician users to develop and run them

And thank you for sharing!

There is a good research paper that compares Process Mining to what we do, Desktop Activity Mining: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/05a4/f2258a48aaaa2b2686f72f...

What we do is a bit different from Process Mining, our approach is known as Desktop Activity Mining, but from a helicopter view it's pretty much the same

Yes, call center is a great example, as any customer order/processing center that uses many non-integrated IT solutions or where APIs don't provide enough flexibility/customization required workflows to run

Great words!

Thanks!

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Thank you, James! Yes, finding processes out of the box helps a lot to open the doors that otherwise stay closed

Thank you, a great point! We have witnessed so many automation/RPA initiatives put on hold/buried because of the complexity or cost of process discovery, that's why a lot of R&D efforts are focused on this specific stage of automation lifecycle

Yes, Excel is the ultimate data mashing/analysis tool for most of the office workers, especially in mid-market. Unfortunately, most users import data to Excel manually, collecting them across different systems and reports, and then manually uoload output of their data manipulation to web forms and legacy software, it seems unreal but people some time take a role of an interface between Excel and other systems. That's why we created visual tool for users to automate working with tables (from spreadsheets to databases) without coding, for some reason no other desktop automation software went that far with Excel/G-sheets.

You are welcome!

Hey, please don't be discouraged, for us it worked because (imho) we came to YC interview with existing paid user base growth, so it was far beyond the idea stage. And I personally applied to YC 3 times, starting from 2015:)

Thanks for the feedback! Robotic Process Automation or RPA is a common name for GUI-level automation but it can be confusing, that's why we more and more often try to refer to what we do as 'software robots' or 'software bots'

Thank you Charles,

1. Interface elements on windows apps and websites typical have identifiers that allow to hook to them correctly even if visual representation/layout changes so we were ablate automate pretty much any software/website we have tried. Some websites use active A/B testing all the time and theta becomes a challenger, though, doable.

2. This is a fundamental challenge of GUI-level automation, were is no silver bullet to completely eliminate the need for bot 'maintenance'. We allow users to create a library of UI elements that they are using in their workflows, again, their identifiers often allow automatically handle UI changes but if not, users can just relink their interface library with changed GUI elements, without disrupting the bot logic, so it becomes a minor effort to see the bot working in changing GUI environment.

3. (1) Real-time tracking of what the bot does, (2) Logs, (3) 'Exception' port to build custom logic for user involvement/notification at every step of the automated process. For instance, the bot can send you Slack message or email if it ran into an issue.

4. It can run on end-user computers, will look like a cross-application macro, or on a virtual machine/server 24/7 ('unattended' process automation). We partner with Microsoft to bundle our software with Azure infrastructure and make it scalable - so you can deploy more specific bots when the workload for them goes up.

5. You are right, this is a cultural aspect and people challenge. In my own experience, the best way to address is to let people who got a few hours back due to routine elimination to share their experience and how their career path has changed since that, for instance they picked up some analytical tasks that otherwise would require a new hire.

Hi, many repetitive processes have certain exceptions and rare situations when a rule-based logic breaks, typically due to variability of incoming data (e.g. robot finds a text instead of a number in certain template field). Our approach is to (1) provide users with custom exception/error handling logic, e.g. evert robot logic step has an "exception" branch that activates of the bot can't correctly complete the activity; (2) be able to activate "human in the loop' function to bring in user when needed; (3) be bale to work with unstructured data like random invoices to minimize the need for (1) and (2)

Yep, it's a right way to think about this as of AutoHotKey on a lot of steroids:)

Yes, these terms actually root in pre-UiPath era and now become the industry standard. OCR libraries are not specific to RPA (e.g. Microsoft OCR,Google OCR, Tesseract, Abbyy) but, again, are pretty much the standard, what we do differently from other RPA vendors is providing users with the ability to visually map scanned template data to variables so it can be done with no code, using only mouse (in line with our focus on simplicity for the developer, works really well for cases when you deal with limited set of templates.

Hey, we host demo videos on our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC014owEr9E1tRVJJKJ3wXdA

Also, check out this recent case of using ElectroNeek to automate accounting data transfer into SaaS tool https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5YXsWSGaRM