Appian 21.1 incorporates many highly-requested features that improve usability and productivity including updated low-code RPA and intelligent document processing (IDP) features.
Enhanced Low-Code RPA
Appian 21.1 makes it even faster to build powerful bots with low-code RPA. New and updated features include Computer Vision automation, enhanced support for low-code actions, and broader ROI insights to show the business value of automations.
Computer Vision
Appian 21.1 uses Computer Vision to automate tasks across both desktop and Citrix VDI environments. It’s intuitively designed, requiring a simple button click to operate.
The image recognition module lets developers adopt to different screen resolutions to ensure bot and data reliability.
Even more Low-Code Actions
Appian 21.1 also provides broader support for low-code actions including mouse actions, tab-through forms, keyboard shortcuts, and text entry in fields. The mouse action module provides more control over users’ desktops; robots can perform mouse movements, clicks, and drags with simple low-code configurations. The element inspector helps users find coordinates, to ensure precise robot movements.
Documents stored in Appian’s document management repository can now be easily downloaded by a robot and then processed locally on the desktop. Robots can manage the local file system, creating a new folder or move files between folders. Desktop files can be uploaded to Appian’s document management repository for further processing, secure storage, and access by other users. Robots can directly upload Appian documents to a browser file upload field.
Here’s an example: An employee uploads a photo from their phone using a mobile task. A robot downloads that photo and copies it into a document on the desktop. The robot uploads the finished document to a folder in Appian and deletes the file from the desktop. Once in Appian, the document can be viewed by other users and stored as part of an audit trail.
Broader ROI Insights
Appian 21.1 also brings broader ROI insights into the low-code RPA component. These insights RPA metrics to calculate break-even and projected vs actual costs and benefits and show the business value from automations.
Intelligent Data Processing, (IDP)
IDP continues to be a key component of Appian complete automation, using AI to classify and extract data from documents. Native extraction capabilities have been improved so users can now extract key-value pairs from digitized, searchable PDFs, without having to send documents to 3rd party clouds. This provides further protection for your data as it moves from an unstructured to a structured format.
Note: The key value pairs extraction feature is a Preview release in 21.1; available in late March of 2021.
IDP enables field-level validations for straight-through processing. This mitigates the need for human reconciliation step when all validations are met.
Get Appian 21.1
Appian 21.1 has a number of exciting new features to help you improve your business processes through automation. To learn more or to download the latest release click here.
