RPA has delivered thousands of hours back to businesses and transformed the way work is done. Work queues play a key role in keeping processes moving efficiently. In this blog post, we’ll explore some common queue management headaches and introduce Universal Queues—the solution to overcoming these challenges so you can go further, faster.
Although queues are not inherently complex, organizations may face limitations which can slow down business operations and frustrate stakeholders.
In our experience, there are two typical challenges:
- Using standard queues in RPA software requires developers to custom-build functionality using the native editors in those tools—which poses challenges when working across multiple platforms.
- A lack of post-production monitoring makes it difficult to spot terminations and infinite loops when they happen—which can lead to delays and additional costs.
How processes currently move through queues
Let’s say, for example, that you want to build an automation process that updates employee addresses. You’ll first need to create a collector subprocess that gathers employee information from a source, such as an Excel file, and uses it to create work queue items for each employee contained within it. Afterwards, you will need to create a consumer process that takes item per item (or employee per employee) from the work queue and updates the address information accordingly.
In an ideal world, the consumer would begin with the first item in the queue and continue sequentially until completion. This doesn’t always happen though. Glitches pop up, virtual machines freeze, and sessions get terminated midway through their execution.
Without an orchestration layer, remedying this requires human operators to manually intervene by stopping the process, restarting virtual machines, comparing input and output information to see which items have failed, informing business stakeholders about the system exceptions, and then rebooting everything.
This remediation usually takes a lot of time and can only happen once the corresponding event has been identified. Most RPA software provides in-platform error messages, meaning that users have to watch queues for exceptions. Alternatively, COEs reactively identify issues based on business feedback. Both approaches have obvious drawbacks.
How C TWO Universal Queues makes your life easier
To help organisations overcome these and other work queue challenges C TWO has developed Universal Queues. Our solution sits on top of RPA vendors such as Blue Prism, UiPath and Automation Anywhere to provide users with real-time information from their RPA vendor queues.
When terminations and infinite loops happen, C TWO pinpoints exactly where and when the process failed and instantly enacts self-recovery capabilities. Machines are automatically reset—picking work up right where it left off prior to the failure.
C TWO gives you complete customization authority so you can define self-recovery settings to your own liking, defining time thresholds and parameters for triggering resets—for example, after X number of terminations or if a session runs for Y amount of time.
Get further, faster
Universal Queues enables users to incorporate multiple technologies, tools, and solutions within the same work queue item(s), providing increased flexibility and adaptability that is further enhanced by API accessibility using REST endpoints for any action.
If there’s a termination, users can quickly take inventory and triage related items completely from the C TWO platform without needing to toggle between multiple technologies.
Go beyond RPA
Internal queues can be managed from anywhere via APIs—for example, from a CRM or ERP, or another RPA environment—bringing unprecedented accessibility to work queues and enabling the users of third-party vendors to integrate different systems, all while benefitting from more robust work queue processes with the additional functionality that C TWO offers.
Highly customizable and capable of integrating work items from a wide range of technologies and data sources, C TWO Universal Queues allows users to create custom attributes. States, tags, deadlines, exceptions, triggers and more can all be custom defined according to unique business use cases and processes. This saves organizations significant amounts of time and enables clearer reporting.
Get in touch
If you’re interested in finding out more about how C TWO can help you spend less time managing your RPA queues and expanding beyond RPA to accelerate your transformation journey, get in touch for a chat with one of our experts!
