This course is also available as self-paced virtual (e-learning) course Automating Tasks Using IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere (ZB502G). This option does not require any travel.

This course is intended to teach the skills that are needed to work with the IBM Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Automation Anywhere Enterprise Client and Control Room to develop and manage bots. The course covers the development of both Meta bots and Task bots but focuses mostly on Task bot development.

The course uses an interactive learning environment, with hands-on exercises to reinforce concepts and check understanding. Lab exercises throughout the course provide hands-on experience with developing robotic tasks.

The course introduces robotic process automation, typical use cases, challenges, good practices and high-level architecture of the IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere product. The emphasis of the course is in hands-on coding in the development environment (i.e. Workbench).  

Development is performed using the most common bot commands. Bots are built to accomplish everyday business challenges including extracting data from various sources, writing data to various sources, conditional processing, and looping. The course also covers the use of various Recorders to record user interactions.

At the completion of the course, the student is encouraged to take a Badge test to earn the Automating Tasks Using IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere V11 badge.

For information about other related courses, see the IBM Training website:

ibm.com/training

After completing this course, you should be able to:

• Describe the IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere Control Room and Enterprise Client
• Understand challenges and risks when implementing robotic process automation
• Describe common use cases for robotic process automation
• Explain robotic process automation and when to use it
• Describe the main components of the product
• Perform basic Bot management and administration
• Understand the difference between attended and unattended bot runners and when to use each.
• Understand the benefits of using Bot Insights
• Understand the high-level architecture and topology
• Understand workload management and when to use queues, work items, and device pools

You will also learn how to develop bots to accomplish common business scenarios including:

• Capturing user interactions using appropriate Recorders
• Running bots from the Workbench and the Control Room
• Using and assigning user and system-defined variables
• Creating a Meta bot to handle an application login
• Integrating with common desktop applications
• Writing data from a text file to an Excel spreadsheet
• Copying spreadsheet data to a Windows application
• Reading and writing from a DB2 database
• Hardening bots against common exceptions
• Debugging bots using the debugging feature
• Applying good practices for coding bots
• Handling corrupt data or an incorrect file
• Extracting data from web pages
• Performing basic string operations
• Sending and receiving emails
• Downloading email attachments
• Extracting data from Adobe PDFs
• Implementing conditional logic
• Adding interactive components
• Calling REST web services
• Basic arithmetic operations
• Defining bot triggers
• Iterative looping
• Error handling

This course is intended for developers who use IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere.

• Practical knowledge of data structures
• Understanding of SQL syntax
• Basic understanding of web services
• Experience with modern programming techniques

Introducing robotic process automation and bots
Introducing IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere
Exercise: Exploring the Control Room
Introducing the Enterprise Client
Exercise: Creating a basic bot
Working with variables, loops, and strings
Exercise: Writing data from a text file to an Excel spreadsheet
Working with the Smart Recorder and the Object Cloning command
Exercise: Automating data entry to a business application and a database
Working with emails, conditional logic, and triggers
Exercise: Creating a bot to sum check declines, query a database, and send an email
Working with email and PDFs
Exercise: Creating a bot to evaluate data from a PDF and send an email
Creating interactive bots
Exercise: Creating an interactive bot to check values in disparate systems
Introducing MetaBots
Exercise: Creating a login MetaBot
Working with web services
Exceptions and error handling
Exercise: Working with web services and error handling
Hardening bots against exceptions
Exercise: Hardening the Account Opening bot
Bot management and reporting
Exercise: Managing bots
Administering bots through the Control Room
Exercise: Administering bots in the Control Room
Course summary