Lab 1: Create your new Automation Process

Overview:

In this module we will create the Automation Process that will monitor an email INBOX waiting for a mail containing an Invoice as an attachment, extract the data from any such invoice, and enter it automatically in the legacy Financial System.

Step 1: Locate the workshop’s Process Category

Login to the RPA Manager instance and use your credentials.
Expand the Process Automation menu and click on Process Management
There should be one Category named as per this pattern YOURWORKSHOPCITY-YYYYMMDD:
Click on this category to start building your Automation processes.

Step 2: Create the Process

The automation process lifecycle is based on four stages or phases:
1. Design: the Business Analyst designs the model of the automation process using the BPMN notation tool, also helped by the MuleSoft RPA Recorder
2. Build: the MuleSoft RPA developer implements the automation process using the bot steps available in the product toolbox (more on this on in the next module)
3. Test: define and run multiple Test Plans to ensure the quality of the process
4. Production: deploy the automation process into one or many bot instances that fulfill the application requirements
In this module we will be covering the Build stage.
Click on the Create button
Use the following pattern for the process name:

<your name and surname/initials>-Module 1-Automate Data Entry into Legacy App

Scroll down and uncheck the Use Process Board option (we will not use the Process Board capabilities on this workshop).

Click Save on the bottom right to create your new automation process.
Open your new process by clicking on its name.

Step 3: Design the Process

Every new process starts in the Design phase. The Design phase allows Business Users to model the basics of the Automation Process, using the BPMN 2.0 notation.

MuleSoft RPA makes use of a subset of the BPMN 2.0 standard. The following elements are supported:

You can also use the floating menu when you click on any of the existing activities to append a new activity to the selected one. Also, to remove an activity use the Remove icon:
In order to accelerate the workshop, we will import a prebuilt model into the process.

Make sure the Module0-Automate Data Entry into Legacy App.bpmn file contained in the Student Files\Module_0_processes folder in the ZIP shared with you is copied locally in the Windows machine (the easiest way to do so is by copying the file from your laptop with a CTRL-C or CMD-C and paste it into the Windows machine with a CTRL-V).

Once copied, click on the Import BPMN button on the canvas to import the provided .bpmn file.

Locate the file and open it. You’ll see a preview of the model. Click on the Import BPMN button and Yes to confirm you’ll overwrite the existing (and empty) model:
Once imported you can review the model:
- First, the process will check an email INBOX for new emails
- Should a new email has been retrieved, the flow will continue or, if not, the whole process will end
- Incoming email should contain an invoice as an attachment and we will proceed to extract the relevant data from it
- Finally, we will open the Legacy System and enter the just retrieved data into it.
- Process will end afterwards.
From this Design phase, we are going to complete the BPMN model with some additional steps.

As you have seen, there is an Exclusive Gateway that checks whether an email has been retrieved or not. However, that is not enough. You may have received an email without an attachment and these are not valid.

So, apart from verifying that an email has been retrieved, we need to add an additional Exclusive Gateway to checked whether the retrieved email includes an attachment.

Make some room between the existing gateway and the Extract Data activities:
Drag and drop a new Exclusive Gateway and place it between the existing one and the Extract Data activity. Make sure you place it on the existing YES flow as follows. Don’t forget to link a Text Annotation with a descriptive label, such as Contains Attachment?
Finally, we need to add the second flow that will be followed when there was no attachment. In that case, we want to retrieve the next available email, so we must go back to the Check Email activity. Double click this new flow to set the NO label, and double click the flow from this new Gateway to the Extract Data and set the "YES" label:

This is how the model should look like now:
Before moving on, make sure you click on the Save button to save all recent changes:

Step 4: Move Process to the Build Phase

Once we have finished with the process modeling, we can move forward to the Build phase, by clicking on the Publish button:
Every time a process is moved forward to the next phase, a confirmation popup window is shown. Check the confirmation option and click the Release to Build button:
Now the process is in the Build phase and ready to be implemented with the MuleSoft RPA Builder tool