ODM RPA Invoicing sample

This sample shows how to invoke IBM ODM from IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere through a simple Decision Bot.

Table of Contents

• Before you begin
  • Required software
  • Create an Invoicely account
  • Create a Credential vault in your Automation Anywhere Control Room
  • Copy sample RPA assets to your Automation Anywhere installation
  • Import the sample Decision Service in Rule Designer
• Scenario
• Automating invoice creation with RPA
  • Creating the Invoice
  • Main Loop
  • Running the sample
• Full automation with RPA and ODM
  • Create a Decision Service with extended business logic and Deploy
  • Deploying a Decision Form
  • Invoke the Decision From from an RPA MetaBot
  • Invoke the Decision MetaBot from the Main RPA task
  • Running the sample
• One step further: decision governance
• Useful Links

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Before you begin

All RPA bots and ODM Decision Service described in this sample can be downloaded from the assets/aa directory.

Required software

Here are the software you need to install in order to run the sample:

• IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere (IBM RPA) leverages ODM to make it possible to automate desktop tasks that involve human judgements that can be captured as ODM decisions.
• IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) provides a complete, easy-to-use system for automating day-to-day operational decisions and allows business people and IT staff to collaborate on business rules by using an interface and a language that are comfortable and intuitive for both.
• NodeJS 8.x or greater: needed to run the npm package below
• ODM Decision Forms: an open source npm package provided by the ODM development team, that generates a form on top of a Decision Service.

Create an Invoicely account

Go to invoicely.com and create an account

Create a Credential vault in your Automation Anywhere Control Room

• Log in to Control Room
• Go to the Credential Manager tab
• Click Add Credential
• Name it invoicing
• Add the following attributes, with their corresponding values:
  • email: email you used to create your Invoicely account.
  • password: password for your account

Copy sample RPA assets to your Automation Anywhere installation

Copy the content of the assets/aa directory to your Automation Anywhere client document directory. Typically, the .atmx and .csv files should end up in a directory of the form
C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Automation Anywhere Files\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks\Invoicing and the metabot in a C:\Users\Administrator\Documents\Automation Anywhere Files\Automation Anywhere\My MetaBots directory.

Import the sample Decision Service in Rule Designer

• Download CompleteInvoice.zip decision service
• Open Rule Designer
• Import the downloaded zip in your workspace with File > Import > Archive file

Scenario

Bea works for Acme Retail, a small retailing company selling books, newspapers, computers, groceries and clothing.

Jack is a client of Acme Retail. Each week, he orders a list of goods to Bea, sending her a CSV file listing the quantity, category and unit price of each item she wants to order.

Bea uses invoicely.com to register invoices corresponding to Jack's orders.

Depending on the quantity and type of goods, Bea applies a tax rate and a discount to each row in the orders CSV and saves the result in her invoicely.com account.

Abu is an IT consultant working for Acme Retail. Bea asks him to automate the invoicing process as much as possible while letting her define discounts and taxes on order items.

We show here how Abu can leverage IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere to automate the reading and editing of invoices and IBM ODM to compute the discounts and taxes of each order item.

Automating invoice creation with RPA

Our first step consists of recording an Automation Anywhere task that reads the CSV file, and, for each row, connects to invoicely.com and create the corresponding invoice.

Since the tax rate and discounted price are not present in the CSV, the RPA task will prompt Bea during the process to let her enter those values.

Note: the RPA bots described in this section are provided in the assets directory. See instructions here.

Creating the Invoice

The Create Invoice.atmx task creates an invoice in Invoicely, given a unit price, a quantity, an order id, an item description, a tax rate, and a client first name and last name.

1. Login, create Invoice, set order ID, description and quantity

   

2. Set tax and unit price

   

   Notice that the tax and unit price are not part of the orders CSV and their computation may not be straightforward, depending on the order items.

3. Set client information, save and logout

   

Main Loop

The Main.atmx task does the following:

• Opens orders CSV file
• For each row

  • Prompt the user with the tax rate and discounted price

    

  • Invoke the invoice creation task.

Here is the complete task:

Running the sample

From the Automation Anywhere Client, simply run %AA_INSTALL%\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks\Invoicing\Main.atmx

Full automation with RPA and ODM

Automation would be complete if we can avoid asking Bea to manually enter the tax rate and discounted price for each order.

This is where IBM ODM will provide agility and enable the bot to handle more complex business logic than it could before in an easy to use format of decision tables or natural language rules.

Note: the RPA bots and decision service described in this section are provided in the assets directory. See instructions here.

Create a Decision Service with extended business logic and Deploy

In ODM, we create a Decision Service that takes a category, price and quantity as input, and returns a discounted unit price and a tax rate and label.

This Decision Service is made of:

• A decision table that determines a VAT from the product category

• A decision table that determines a discount from the product quantity and category

• A specific rule that sets a discount when the product category is 'grocery'

Once you have downloaded the decision service, open it in ODM Rule Designer, and deploy it to your local Rule Execution Server.

Deploying a Decision Form

A Decision Form is an auto-generated form allowing to execute a Decision Service. Once this form is generated, we will write an RPA MetaBot to invoke it and get the tax and discounted price for each order.

You now need to install and run the odm-decision-forms npm package, which will provide you with a generated form to invoke the decision service.

Make sure you have NodeJS 8.x or greater installed:

node --version

Install the odm-decision-forms npm package:

npm install -g odm-decision-forms

Run the odm-decision-forms server:

odm-decision-forms --decisionservice http://localhost:9090/DecisionService --console http://localhost:9090/res

Note: we assume that your ODM server is running at http://localhost:9090. You can change it to fit your installation.

Then open the following URL: http://localhost:3000/ruleapp/CompleteInvoice_Ruleapp/CompleteInvoice_Ruleset

Test the form by entering some input values and hit Run Decision. You should get the following result:

Tip: you can see the list of generated forms for each deployed ruleset at http://localhost:3000

Invoke the Decision From from an RPA MetaBot

We then create a MetaBot that will enter input data in the Decision Form, run the Decision Service, and get the results back as output parameters.

Invoke the Decision MetaBot from the Main RPA task

Finally, we can amend our main task calling ODM instead of prompting the user. The invocation of the MetaBot consists of mapping the task variables to/from input/output parameters of the MetaBot.

Running the sample

From the Automation Anywhere Client, simply run %AA_INSTALL%\Automation Anywhere\My Tasks\aa\Main with ODM metabot.atmx

You can see a live demo of the running bot here: https://youtu.be/Z9QIBERy3k8

One step further: decision governance

Once the RPA tasks are ready and the decision bot is functional, you may publish your Decision Service to ODM Decision Center in order to take advantage of its governance capabilities such as user permission, release management and testing.

Should a discount or a tax need to be changed, Bea can simply connect to Decision Center and edit the corresponding rule or decision table.

Each time a new version of the Decision Service is ready, either Abu or Bea can redeploy it to Rule Execution Server without having to change anything to the RPA tasks.

This way, we have complete decoupling of the lifecycle and ownership of the decision logic from the RPA task authoring.

Useful Links

• IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere: main portal for IBM RPA with Automation Anywhere and IBM BPM / ODM integration scenarios.
• Using ODM to make a decision within an RPA activity: a sample describing how to invoke ODM from RPA through a 'JSON' metabot.
• Automation Anywhere and IBM ODM: a tutorial video from Neil Kolban (Salient Process) showing how to fill in an Excel spreadsheet from Automation Anywhere, requesting values from IBM ODM through a SOAP call

Issues and contributions

For issues relating to this sample, please use the GitHub issue tracker. We welcome contributions following our guidelines.

License

The source files found in this project are licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

Notice

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2017.