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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Deciding on the Right Data to Prove PerformanceAutomation Pathfinder Program

 Consistency is Key If you expect to have 3-4 different federated teams building automations on the Automation 360 platform 18 months from now, expect to have about 12 different methods of reporting savings. Why? Because without guidance from the organization’s governing Automation Practice on capturing, storing, and reporting savings, everyone will come up with their own methods - and expect many of them to be less than accurate or auditable. Seek to answer questions like:How are we measuring the value that our automations are generating? How do we track how much money an automation saves? What’s the best way to track these values across multiple bots? How do business value metrics like money and/or time saved relate to operational metrics like the number of bot runs? And which ones do I report on to an executive? See the Future Whether you’re just starting out with Automation Anywhere, or your organization has been building bots for a while, one thing is certain: someone - with some

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Citizen Development Enablement - Accelerate PhaseAutomation Pathfinder Program

 Citizen Development is a lever for scale that many organizations leverage to expand and multiply the ROI for their automation programs. A citizen developer is an employee who comes from something other than a computer-science background - who is creating automations that are consumed by themselves or their team. Citizen Developers are typically motivated business users who’ve identified areas for streamlining/automating areas of their business processes and are interested in creating solutions to meet their own need(s). Organizations who’ve taken on Citizen Development programs have unlocked 2 key benefits:Faster Innovation - With business users able to self-identify, and prioritize their own use cases, they aren’t reliant on the capacity of a central automation development team to deliver innovative automations.ROI Acceleration - The development of additional automations means that organizations are seeing automation impacts more broadly across their organization, rather than being l

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Managing Reusable Assets - Start PhaseAutomation Pathfinder Program

There’s a phrase that is said commonly in programming disciplines (developing automations not excluded) - “don’t reinvent the wheel”. This phrase is used to suggest that there may not be a great reason to create something net-new, if there are reusable, potentially optimized assets already available that can be leveraged to solve your problem. In this post, we want to examine how building with a “reusability-first” mindset can accelerate your automation development efforts and ultimately make life as an automation developer easier. Building with a Reusability-First mindset means going through the following thought pattern anytime you come across the need to do something repeatable within your build: Is there something that exists already that I can leverage to make my life easier here? This may be identifying and using a built-in package instead of trying to script something out or this may mean checking within the shared public repository of your Control Room to see what reusable subt

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Exploring Thought Leadership by Contributing to Bot StoreAutomation Pathfinder Program

 Now that you have a matured RPA practice, you can start building thought leadership and technical expertise showcase by contributing packages to Bot Store. Packages offer organizations maximum flexibility in the way they create reusable components that can be used across multiple bots. They are modular in that they can be updated independently, and maintain version controls in that upgrading a package doesn’t impact bots built off of a previous version of the same package. Here are some of the ways you can identify what are the packages to build: You have been building bots for a couple of years and you have identified features that would help multiple teams immensely but are not available out of the box, then it's a good use case to build. You want to build bots that automate specific enterprise applications, but there is no such specific package available and it’s currently being automated either using Recorder-Capture or with REST package. Read Analyst reports about popular ERP

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Contributing Specific Bots to the Bot StoreAutomation Pathfinder Program

As you now have exposure to building production-grade bots and automating a variety of use cases, you can explore contributing specific Bots to Bot Store. Gone are the days we built something for ourselves and thought we just want to keep it to ourselves as they are our USP (Unique selling point), however, what if we told you, there is a better way to build your brand by showcasing your expertise with the world and build competitive advantage online. Now you are curious to know how it can really help you by contributing to Bot Store, let’s look at some of the key benefits: Creates a Marketing funnelOnce you publish your bots on Bot Store, your work is seen by a lot of Automation Anywhere customers who look at the Bot Store for new automations to be built. When they download your bot, you will be notified with their email information, which you can use to follow up and understand how it's working for them and offer additional services to build new features or to manage their existing au

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Leveraging Pre-Built Automations and PackagesAutomation Pathfinder Program

Before you start automating any new use case related to a specific process or an application, you’ll want to know exactly what reusable assets you have at your disposal. Automation Anywhere’s Bot Store offers hundreds of pre-built bots and packages built by process automation and integration specialists. Leveraging Bot Store, developers can expect to accelerate their RPA development instead of having to build everything from scratch. Bot Store bots/packages are broken down by business process they serve, their categorization, and by the applications they engage with. Beyond being a location for downloading pre-built bots to include in bot builds, Bot Store is also an excellent place for automation ideas and to explore some of the “art of the possible” with RPA. Automation 360 platform is integrated with Bot Store, meaning, you can directly download the bots to the control room and start using it right away. Bot Store can help you in many ways, lets's take a quick look at some of the ke

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Framework for Expanding Automation OpportunitiesAutomation Pathfinder Program

 By now, you’ve hopefully built some familiarity with the Solution Patterns introduced in the Start phase. You’ve likely found that a good number of your use cases fit into one of those patterns, and your familiarity with the patterns has made the process of categorizing, documenting, and delivering automations a more streamlined process. We aren’t ditching those patterns. They are still valid and there are still plenty of new use cases that will come to you that will fit one of the patterns described. We are , however, going to explore a few new patterns so you can expand the types of automation opportunities that the team can take on. This isn't just for the sake of saying “there's different ones too!” Expansion into these new patterns represents a maturity in your use of the full capabilities of the Automation Anywhere platform and enables your automation practice to open up to new ways of thinking about how Automation Anywhere created automations can enable the various business tea

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Beginning to Leverage Complimentary TechnologiesAutomation Pathfinder Program

One of the most appealing aspects of Automation 360 is that it's not programming-language-specific. You don't have to be an expert at any specific programming language to be able to build robust, high-impact automations, making for an easy-to-learn, approachable platform. That said, while learning about the capabilities of Automation 360, you may have noticed that it also enables developers to leverage several programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, .NET, etc) from within a bot by leveraging language-specific packages and a customizable package SDK. In this blog post, we'll take a look at why you may want to hold off on some of that functionality and when/where it makes sense. Out-of-the-Box Packages: Working with Interfaces Automation 360 offers a wide range of out-of-the-box packages designed to enable automation developers to automate with/on various interfaces. These available packages enable automation developers to automate on top of existing user interfaces (recorder pa

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Building an Internal Community of PracticeAutomation Pathfinder Program

 Federating your development efforts means that, by this point, you likely have a decent number of newcomers who have benefitted from regular “office hours” sessions by asking questions, listening in to the answers provided to the questions from others, or learning about newly available reusable assets. As your automation program continues to grow, there are two key areas that can help accelerate the onboarding and maturation of new developers being brought into the “fold” of your burgeoning automation practice. Citizen Developer Office Hours The first time I was told about Robotic Process Automation at my previous employer it was described to me by a well-meaning business leader who said “it’s these robots that sit behind you and watch what you’re doing on your computer...they eventually start to use your keyboard and mouse for you, and you don't have to do anything.” He wasn't trying to mislead anyone intentionally, he just legitimately didn't really understand the technology, so he

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Propelling the Next Leg of ExpansionAutomation Pathfinder Program

 By this point in the journey for your Automation Practice, you’ve partnered with at least one new line of business for the delivery of new automations. Regardless of whether that delivery came by way of your core automation practice doing the design and delivery or you empowered this new line of business to be somewhat independent, the lessons learned and the momentum gained for the expansion of automation across your organization can empower the next leg of expansion within your organization. Let’s look at some keys to systematically scale your automation initiatives as you continue to expand. A Systematic Onboarding Approach Key to expanding your automation efforts to be organization-wide is systematically onboarding new “factories” to your automation practice. As you worked with onboarding your first few lines of business in the Accelerate phase, reflect back on the things that helped this onboarding process to go more smoothly, as well as those things that seemed to confuse/detrac

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Delivering Automations for a New Functional AreaAutomation Pathfinder Program

 With some successful deliveries attributed to your automation program and some grassroots evangelism efforts underway to communicate the value being delivered for the organization, it's time to explore delivering automations for a new functional area within the organization. As this is likely the first expansion of automation delivery outside of the automation center of excellence team, it will be vitally important to make this first delivery partnership successful, and set the stage for a systematic approach to scale as you move forward. Taking The Show On The Road Similarly to when your automation team got started with automation; identifying quick win processes, capturing and applying best practices, establishing a pattern for documentation and delivery, etc; it will be important that any newly-onboarded factory goes through some of those same steps, albeit enabled by the “lessons learned” from the automation CoE team. All of that said, the participation and involvement of this new

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Setting the Stage for an Automation-First OrganizationAutomation Pathfinder Program

 The Vision for an Automation-First Company Culture Many of the lessons from this journey--from the production of bots, to a robust pipeline where anyone is encouraged to submit ideas, to the ongoing promotion and evangelism efforts--are designed to ultimately support an organization adopting an “Automation-First” company culture. An Automation-First company culture represents a shift for many organizations in the way that they view their processes, their people, and the platforms that they use daily. Knowing how an Automation-First organization views these assets can help set the stage for where your organization can go along its automation journey and can empower you with a vision for how the future of your organization’s digital transformation strategy can be empowered through the expanded adoption of automation.  Processes - Objectively looking at the processes that make up the work that individuals are doing across functional areas of an organization, one theme seems to repeat its

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling the Automation Journey: Scaling with Citizen Development

 Once your automation program has "in orbit" (pun entirely intended) and ready to scale to that next level of your automation program growth. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our third session in the series: Scaling with Citizen Development. If you missed one of our previous sessions, we've got them all on the Hyperscaling The Automation Journey landing page - so be sure to check them out for additional content on growing and scaling your CoE. This session's focus is squarely looking at the experience of inviting business users (presumably with 0 background in computer science or information technology) to contribute to the automation program within your organization. Why Citizen Development? There's a couple key reasons why organizations will reach for the Citizen Development lever which looking to scale their automation program:  Enabling Function for Bus

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling the Automation Journey: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate your Automation Program

 Once your automation program has "taken flight" (pun entirely intended) - it can at times be challenging to know what exactly needs to be done to accelerate to that next level of your automation program maturity. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - with our second session in the series: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your Automation Program. If you missed session one, be sure to check out 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing. Whether you've just stood up your first CoE, or you've been doing this for a few years - these 3 growth hacks can be the jet fuel needed (more space puns) to accelerate your program's growth. Growth Hack 1: Leverage Best Practices The idiom "herding cats" describes the often futile attempts to control or organize a class of entities that are inherently uncontrollable. When a group of independent developers are all given the s

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling Your Automation JourneyAutomation Pathfinder Program

 Everyone wants an automation program that scales in a sustainable and manageable way. In this series, we're going to be going through the tips and tricks you need to know to set up an automation program that is built for scale. Additionally, we'll share some actionable takeaways that you can get started with right away to ensure you're setting your program up to be successful.   Session 1: 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing  Everyone gets started somewhere right? In this session, Micah Smith and Mark Goodaire cover the three most common pitfalls keeping automation programs from growing. In this session, you'll learn all about how organizations get stuck in these pitfalls, and most importantly: what they can do about it.   3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program from Growing  Session 2: 3 Growth Hacks to Accelerate Your Automation Program  Once you've moved past the getting started phase of your automation program, some organizations stall out.

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Virtual Meetup: Working with DLLs in Automation 360

This session is scheduled for Sep 7th, Wednesday between 7.30 PM - 8.45 PM IST (10 AM - 11.15 AM EDT).Automation 360 platform is extensible and you can bring in the power of different technologies and use them within the platform to explore additional capabilities.In this virtual meetup, we will discuss about the following topics:What is a DLL? Why we need a DLL? Creating a DLL using Visual Studio Using DLL in Automation 360 bot Applications of DLLs in real-world scenariosFor this session, we have invited Dipendra Shekhawat, our own Solution Architect at Automation Anywhere to share his experience working with DLLs in Automation 360 platform, along with our Developer Evangelist Arjun S Meda. Dipendra also has his Youtube channel Dipendra Shekhawat where he teaches different tech topics along with RPA in Hindi.To join us, please register here.Here are the meetup group links in different cities for you to join. We look forward to meeting you in person once the conditions get better, till

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Hyperscaling the Automation Journey: 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program From Growing

 Everyone who starts an automation practice at their organization has the aspirations of growing and scaling that practice in a sustainable way - that can deliver meaningful benefit to their organization's digital transformation objectives. In this special Hyperscaling The Automation Journey series of #AAillustrates, we're diving into the proficiencies of automation programs that grow and scale - starting off with our first in the series: 3 Pitfalls Keeping Your Automation Program From Growing. Whether you've just stood up your first CoE, or you've been doing this for a few years - you won't want to miss our 3 common pitfalls - as we discuss the impacts they can have both on new and existing automation programs - as well as some actionable takeaways to get started with today - to promote sustained, scalable growth. Pitfall 1: Failing to Measure From the Start Many organizations fall into this trap - especially when they get started: they report on the "metrics" of the program by means

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Virtual Meetup Recap: Building Your Brand - Thinking Beyond Just Bot Development

In this virtual meetup, we discussed about how you can build your brand and the tools you can use. Our Panelists blog:Asif's blog: https://www.rpabloggs.com/ Ashwin's blog: https://thecodingtheory.com/ Chand's blog: https://dev.to/chandmohammadTools to use:Slides/Images MS PowerPoint Canva Photopea Adobe ExpressVideo recording/editingCamtasia Active Presenter OBS Studio DaVinci ResolveAudioAudacityStock Images:Pixabay Pexels UnsplashConclusion:In this era of content creators and influencers, it’s not just enough to do the work quietly and let the work speak, instead, we need to show the world what we can do, help others grow, and help ourselves grow on the way.To know about our upcoming meetups, here are the meetup group links in different cities for you to join. We look forward to meeting you in person once the conditions get better, till then let’s continue to meet online.Bengaluru Meetup Group Delhi Meetup Group Chennai Meetup Group Hyderabad Meetup Group Pune Meetup Group Singapore

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Community Article: Supercharging Automation Anywhere with Workato

This tutorial is a guest post from Ashwin A.K from Speridian Technologies  - a global business and technology solutions provider. Speridian's business and technology experts help clients modernize their businesses through Digital Transformation.If you have an idea for a blog post or tutorial that you think would benefit the Automation Anywhere developer community, let us know at developer@automationanywhere.com. Developing robust automations doesn’t have to be a challenging task. You just need to understand what to use where.Image Caption: Which is ‘where’ most of us are stuck.If you are comfortable working with just RPA, chances are you will develop entire automations with whatever is currently available at the RPA workspace. If that is your approach, then you might not be too keen on exploring solutions that require a bit of scripting.On the flipside, if you love coding then you would be inclined to rely on scripts more, even going as far as to drench the entire automation with code.

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Migrating Metabots with DLLs to A360

 MetaBots are highly reusable, create it once, and use it everywhere functional subtasks. They are DLL or screen-capture based – and enable organizations to create highly reusable components that can be called from the bots that are created in Automation Anywhere Enterprise v10/v11. Because they can serve as reusable “library” style automation components, Metabots are also used to swiftly accommodate newer versions of apps and services utilized in an enterprise organization. Regardless of whether your MetaBots being DLL based or screen-capture based, at some point – you’ll need to migrate them to Automation 360. In this tutorial we’ll go through the process of migrating a bot that references a DLL-based Metabot to demonstrate what these assets look like as you migrate them to Automation360! For some background on the bots we’re working with, we're using an Automation Anywhere Enterprise v11 bot that was designed to complete this challenge. In this process, the Metabot is responsible fo

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Using the JSON Package | #AAillustrates

  Most REST Web Services (APIs), some configuration files, and many NoSQL DB's have something in common - they all use JSON. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight, extensible format for storing, transporting, and retrieving data. JSON is designed to be flexible, easy to understand - using key-value pairs of data - and is often used when data is sent from a server to a webpage (when the page you're reading loaded for example). In this tutorial, we'll take a look at using the built-in Automation 360 JSON package read JSON values and arrays from a REST Get response.The video tutorial above and text below makes reference to the following resources:Sample REST Get Endpoint (use this for your REST Web Service Get URI): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AutomationAnywhere/JSON_Package-EmployeeSample/main/HR-employeeSample.json JavaFX Package: https://botstore.automationanywhere.com/bot/java-fx-packageStart SessionThe Start Session action enables developers to establish a session

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Meetup Recap: Working with Google Document AI in Automation 360 platform

Thanks to our guest speaker Sukhjinder Singh Virk for sharing his expertise with the developer community. During this virtual meetup, we discussed how to use Generic and Specialized parsers from Google Document AI service in the Automation 360 platform.Here is the recording of the session for your reference:  Here are the reference files showcased during the session.Here is the link to create service account key.Conclusion:Google Cloud provides a group of AI-powered parsers that take documents in various formats and return cleanly structured data. Specialized solutions such as Lending DocAI, Procurement DocAI, and Contract DocAI are available from Google to solve industry-specific use cases related to data extraction which can assist you in building powerful integrations in Automation 360 bots.To know about our upcoming meetups, here are the meetup group links in different cities for you to join. We look forward to meeting you in person once the conditions get better, till then let’s c

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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
How to use Google Doc AI package in Automation 360 platform

  The Google Doc AI Package enables organizations to extract text from a variety of image and document types using Google’s pre-trained document parsers. The package has a total of 3 actions – Connect, Extract, and Disconnect. The extracted document text is returned as an easy-to-read JSON with key-value data for each extracted field. JSON response received from the API can be parsed using the JSON package which has separate actions for returning a specific node value as well as returning a list of objects should your JSON contain an array. Use these sample PDF files (see attachment below) to try out the parsers discussed in the video. (GCP). You can use this link to create a service account key on GCP. To create a new processor on Google cloud platform, you can use this link. Conclusion Google Cloud Platform has both generic OCR capabilities and specific AI-powered parsers that take documents in various formats and return cleanly structured data. Specialized solutions such as Lending

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Bot Games Season 2: What Bot Games Means to Me – Pradnya Mind

Bot Games is a great opportunity for both new and experienced users to learn and practice using Automation 360 more effectively. In this video, we hear from one of those community members – Pradnya Mind – on her experience with Bot Games and what it’s meant for her both personally and professionally.  This video features Pradnya Mind, a Senior Cluster Manager (Program Manager-RPA) at Bajaj Finserv. She explains how she came across Bot Games for the first time and how she got started with it. She also highlights the positive influence that playing Bot Games has had on her professional life and the ways in which it has assisted her in her role as an RPA Developer, also making recommendations to those who are new to Bot Games. Don't forget to check developer.automationanywhere.com/botgames for more Bot Games content!

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2 years ago
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Automation Anywhere TeamAutomation Anywhere Team
published in Pathfinder Blog
Bot Games Season 2: What Bot Games Means to Me – Rafael Lima

Bot Games is a great opportunity for both new and experienced users to learn and practice using Automation 360 more effectively. In this video, we hear from one of those community members – Rafael Lima – on his journey as an RPA developer and how Bot Games helped him in his career.   This video features Rafael Lima, an RPA Developer at Accenture. He's a Computer Science student and an Automation Anywhere Certified professional. He shares his career background and how he first became involved with RPA. In addition to this, he discusses the learning resources that he finds helpful, the part that Bot Games played in launching his professional career as an RPA developer, and some advice for others who are just getting started in the field. Don't forget to check our Developer Challenges for more Bot Games content!

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