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At our company we've been using and developing Thinkwise applications since mid last year. Business already very positive with the platform as we’re moving out of our legacy landscape.

 

Already the questions arise about RPA, is it possible to develop and use RPA on Thinkwise applications. My question is if there is experience in this community with Thinkwise and RPA. What does work well, what are the benefits, pitfalls, etc.

 

Hope to hear soon, thanks in advance!

 

Hi Jeroen,

First of all, thank you for posting this question. It is a hot topic so good to be mentioned on our community.

There are several possibilities to accomplish this. 

First of all keep an eye on the UTA(Universal Thinkwise (AI) Assistant) project which will provide a language/chat bases interaction for users to question or instruct the system.

For testing purposes the UI is equipped with “data-testIds” to hook external tools to the UI to command user actions. We use Cypress and Playwright to automate user action to the system to do E2E testing. The newly releases TestWise tool is an example that uses this. You can find there ids when you inspect the UI with the browsers DevTools (F12):

 

RTP is about automating UI actions. This is an alternative to directly accessing the back-end API. Our Indicium web-service is available to the clients to communicate with, which might be an alternative to this.

Can you give us an example of an user action you would like to automate?

Best regards,
Erik Brink


Thx Erik for your info!

One of the user interactions is to copy paste information from another system, containing PDF documents, into a Thinkwise application.

 

Based on a specific identifier in the PFD, detail information is lookuped in Thinkwise and based on some simple business rules information from the PDF is concatenated and entered in the Thinkwise app. 

 

 


This raises a lot of questions to me to come to a proper solution, like what is the source of the PDF file and could there be interaction between both systems without a PDF file in between?

I would advice to discuss this in more detail with on of your Thinkwise consultants.

If there are actual extensions of the platform required for this, feel free to raise Ideas for it.


A ‘proper’ interface between two applications is always better than RPA, although that is not always feasible due to restrictions on IT capacity. That's why RPA may be a solution that also will add value.

 

The questions I have is more about experiences gained by other companies using a RPA solution in relation to a Thinkwise application. “A web page is a weg page” is not always the case in terms of the HTML code being generated and how the RPA tool deals with that. .. also time-outs/latency of Thinkwise platform upgrades to name some topics can have an effect on a RPA-tool.

 

 


This is definitely a topic to do some research for in the future. This is not actively on the roadmap as far as I know.

Feel free to share experiences indeed.

It might be used on top of the Thinkwise platform as I mentioned before as the automatic testing tools do too.