The Power of Two: HCL Workload Automation and Robotic Process Automation Working in Tandem

Digital transformation is imperative for all businesses and is providing them with more agile and efficient capabilities by absorbing the changes and opportunities of a mix of digital technologies. Nowadays, this transformation is driven by innovative business models focusing on achieving customer delight through IT-enabled solutions and services that are in fact translating into business growth and resiliency against market disruption.

Automation trends

As per the recent study conducted by an esteemed market research firm, by 2024, enhancements in analytics and automatic remediation capabilities will refocus 30% of IT operations efforts, from support to continuous engineering.

To stay competitive in today’s ever-changing business environment, a company’s IT must be agile enough to become accustomed to changing requirements placed on it by both the business and its employees. Automation is the primary lever in reshaping the requirements for application management to improve business results, such as top-line sales growth and the opportunity to invest in innovation by more strategically allocating digital spending delivering the smoothest, fastest digital experience to all users.

What Business Needs?

Most of the enterprises usually have one or more complex tools that cover only a limited portion of their systems and often end up working in silos. Across the globe and driven by the demands of the digital transformation there is a definite drift towards automation platform that can not only offer end to end integrated orchestration but additionally provide a consolidated view across diverse applications running on-premises, private/hybrid, or multi-cloud resulting in agility, flexibility, and faster time to market.

HCL Workload Automation – Meta Orchestrator

HCL Workload Automation (HWA) is a complete solution for batch, real-time IT, and application workload management that seamlessly orchestrates complex workflows across multiple applications, platforms, and clouds. It provides a single point of control of automation processes for application developers, IT administrators, and operators, allowing both autonomy and precise governance.

HCL Workload Automation integrates seamlessly with industry-leading applications on any domain, specialized plugins, and REST APIs including SAP, PeopleSoft, Informatica, Hadoop, Mainframe, Oracle, etc. It also provides out-of-the-box integration with leading RPA tools to carve out business process automation helping customers accelerate their digital transformation journey. It is expected to boost the level of automation to improve the delivery of critical business services. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an ideal fit for repetitive, high-volume activities that eat most of the productivity of engineers while WLA allows for effective enterprise-wide automation that lets businesses automate, initiate, coordinate, monitor, manage, change processes and data workflows across a dynamic system. By leveraging the capabilities of HCL Workload Automation and RPA we bring in operational and cost efficiencies for the customer.

HCL Workload Automation and Robotic Process Automation: The unbeatable couple

HCL Workload Automation is a unified automation platform that covers all angles right from application management, cloud transition, migration, and system integration operation services, thereby facilitating the delivery of more automated and responsive services to drive value to the business, end-users, and IT. This paves the perfect way for a future-proof and hybrid/Multi cloud-enabled one-stop automation shop.

HCL Workload Automation integration with RPA helps rapidly achieve major use cases that IT needs to address to drive a virtuous cycle of improvement for the enterprise – which is a real competitive advantage. There can be lot of use cases across verticals like telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, etc. where both disciplines can work together to help deliver a business service. To better understand, see the following example.

A healthcare organization receives a huge number of files on its legacy/custom application every hour. All these files need to be processed as per stringent business SLA’s and executed based on various validations, checks, and complex scheduling criteria.

Fig1: HCL Workload Automation & Robotic Process Automation working in tandem.

As depicted in the above workflow, the operations team has to manually carry out mundane multiple tasks every two hours throughout the day that includes:

1. Login to customer-specific network.
2. Open the browser and type the URL of a customized website which is not API exposed.
3. Once the website is open, they must go across multiple tabs and finally click on the Download files tab.
4. Validate the file based on timestamp, size, records, etc.
5. Once validation & checks are performed correctly, they can download the file and transfer it to an FTP server, process and merge it with the on-premises DB
6. Finally, share detailed reporting with the business users.

Moreover, the files which need to be processed on a weekly or monthly basis are dependent on their last successful run. So, if the last run was not completed successfully, the current weekly/monthly processing will be on hold and business users will be notified for the same.

The entire process is very complex in terms of dependencies and scheduling. For this reason, we have introduced HCL Workload Automation which ensures that complex scheduling and event base triggering are in place.

With out-of-the-box integration of HCL Workload Automation and RPA, HCL Workload Automation triggers a bot that runs the mundane task and, at the end of the workflow, downloads a specific file, using the file watcher capability to ensure that the time stamp, size, records, etc. of the file are validated. After the successful validation of the file, HCL Workload Automation invokes the file transfer capability and transfers the file to the destination server. At the same time, the critical business SLA is checked by using the critical job functionality to make sure that the file is delivered on time. If the check result is negative, HCL Workload Automation will automatically notify the users. The ETL (Extract, Transfer & Load Data) process is called by HCL Workload Automation: it extracts the detailed report and sends a notification to all business users.

Business Benefits:

The combined capability of HCL Workload Automation & RPA not only delivers agility, reliability, and flexibility but also integrates multiple applications and infrastructure delivery services into a scalable IT ecosystem. Listed below are the key benefits that customers can leverage:

1. Off-the-shelf ready solution with a plug-and-play mechanism to deliver agile operations.
2. Predict and monitor the business SLA, increase uptime of business-critical workflows by 40%.
3. Automate and orchestrate end-to-end business workflow based on real-time events, resulting in better operational efficiency and service availability.
4. Improved business agility by 45% and more than 35% faster turnaround time as compared to manual/semi-manual processing.
5. Offer Business Process Automation for customers, with extended visibility into processes and transactions to cut downtime for completing the activities from hours to minutes.

To conclude, the new wave of modernization in IT demand an integrated automation approach & strategy, solving the broader impacts of digitalization and digital transformation. As they say, there is no one-size-fits-all approach; it is important to keep a close eye on the evolving patterns and learn along the way to make this transformation experience as seamless as possible. To comprehend its true value, it is essential to work with a partner like HCL that can offer innovative solutions, bringing business agility back for applications to deliver value faster to our customers and help them respond effectively and enthusiastically.

Do you want to keep the conversation going or have any feedback? Drop us a line at ernesto.carrabba@hcl.com and AnantB@hcl.com.

Learn more about HCL Workload Automation here or drop us a line at HWAinfo@hcl.com?

Automate Anything, Run Anywhere!