What is RPA Production Support & Why is it required?

Friends, in this post we will help you understand RPA Production Support with a simple step-by-step process.

What is RPA Production Support?

The focus of the production support/maintenance team is to proactively identify any adverse scenarios and provide a quick fix to any issues that come up and handle incidents caused externally due to system or network errors and updates.

The production support system maintains, monitors, and secures all automated processes. It ensures that your automated and business-critical processes can run smoothly 24/7.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

The Production Support team has the explicit responsibility to make sure that bots are scheduled and monitored in accordance with the plan agreed with process SMEs.

This ensures proper controls are in place to avoid any unauthorized bots running in production. The production support team is responsible for:

•  Scheduling and monitoring bots in production
•  Coordinating with IT infrastructure teams to ensure the availability of automated business processes and resolution of any issues that affect the execution of bots
•  Publish a dashboard with bot execution results
•  Co-ordination with business SMEs for process exceptions or failures of bots
•  Maximize the utilization of runners (licenses) by scheduling the processes effectively

Production Support/Run management covers the following areas:

Why RPA Production Support/Maintenance structure is required?

Diligent support structure service ensures the maximized up-time of automated processes. RPA maintenance service ensures the business continuity of critical processes.

• Address all configuration/application level changes in the given SLA.
• Propose a Support governance model to handle all releases of integrated applications.
• Address all service requests in the given SLA.
• Reporting capability to showcase transaction execution failure reasons due to various system-level validation.
• Provide weekly robot execution status reports on a regular basis.
• Provided 24×5 dedicated on-desk support with phone/ email support over weekends.
• Handled all configuration changes/process level changes in the given SLA.
• Incident Resolution with P1, P2 and P3 tickets being solved completely within defined SLAs
• All service requests were successfully completed within defined SLAs
• Proactive Release impact assessments to find out field-level changes in applications and prevent bot failures.
• 100% Customer Satisfaction achievement.

Types of Issues in Production

We have listed the common production issues that occur related to – Infrastructure, Application, and Bot.

Infrastructure related issues

• Share drive is down
• VMs not responding
• Bot Runner does not connect with Orchestrator
• Control Room is down
• Bot Runner machine does not boot

Application (Global) related issues

• Latency issue with the application
• Application is down/crashed

BOT related issues

• Application change (Screens, controls…)
• Issues due to incorrect data are given as input to the BOT for processing

Issues Stakeholders

 *GST (Global Support Team): Support team of infrastructure and applications involved in RPA.

*RPA Support Team: Internal Robotic Process Automation support team- The team includes 1 Architect or Tech lead and 1 developer, responsible for moving projects to Production and supporting post-production.

* Platform Global Support – Platform Global Support Team (Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, UI Path e.t.c.)

Production Support Workflow

The diagram below represents the RPA production support workflow.

Priority Levels from P1 to P4

Best Practices

1. During the development of BOT, ensure that proper logs are maintained at the transaction level.
2. Logs can be saved in .CSV file or Database, using which a dashboard can be created to monitor transaction progress by team owners.
3. Email notification is sent if any transaction is not processed by a BOT.
4. Always use Error handling to handle errors like screen changes.

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Summary

We hope that this post on RPA Production Support is helpful for you and you got to know what you came here looking for. Please share it with your RPA colleagues and among your RPA network.

Happy Automation!