¶ NIAH Release Notes
NIAH release notes outlining recent changes, improvements and fixes can be found here.
¶ Getting Started 🤖
We hope you're enjoying automating your business processes with NexBotix. This documentation will help guide you through general usage across the NexBotix platform, but if you still have questions or are stuck, you can of course contact our support team who will be happy to get you moving again. Simply email customersupport@nexbotix.com to submit a ticket and we'll get right back to you.
¶ The NexBotix Automation Suite
NexBotix automations are comprised of two key components
- A Bot or Automation Service - A piece of software that sits on a computer with one job, to automate part of or all of a business process.
- The NexBotix Intelligent Automation Hub (NIAH) - Our flagship app, designed to allow users to interact with the bot, instructing it on how to proceed with the unexpected occurs and providing insights into how automations are running.
¶ What is a Bot? 🤖
A bot is a piece of software that works in the same way as a human. It clicks buttons, makes keystrokes and reads the screen.
Whether the process being automated makes use of a desktop application, or a website, the bot can perform the same tasks as would be carried out by a human. If the bot runs into a scenario it hasn't seen before, or it decides it is not able to continue, it will create a business exception in NIAH for a human to review. Humans can tell the bot how to proceed. Bots can also raise items for approval in NIAH, and request that a human take manual steps before it continues with the automated process.
¶ What is an Automation Service? ⚙️
An automation service is similar to a bot, but it doesn't perform UI automation such as mouse clicks and keystrokes.
Automation services are less bespoke than bots. They have repeatable logic that they run 24/7, whereas bots tend to be scheduled to perform their tasks at specific times. They have a single responsibility that they carry out over and over again.
Examples of automation services include:
- Outlook Service - Fetching of emails from Outlook and stripping of attached documents
- Graph API Service - Fetching of emails via API and stripping of attached documents
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Service - AI-Assisted document extraction from invoices, contracts, purchase orders, letters etc
- File Pickup Service - Pickup of files for use in other parts of an automated process
- Outcomes Service - Sender of daily reports outlining results from the day's processing
¶ Introducing NIAH
NIAH - Supreme Automation Leader, Mother of Bots!!!
NIAH (NexBotix Intelligent Automation Hub) is our "human-in-the-loop" solution, designed to incorporate human oversight at critical stages of automation. This involves tasks such as verifying data, selecting appropriate processing routes, correcting key data points, approving actions, assigning cases, and more. Detailed information on each of these interactions can be found on dedicated pages within this documentation.
Our goal is to provide a solution that is both powerful and user-friendly, enabling you to actively influence automated processes while ensuring business exceptions are properly handled. Instead of halting operations, business exceptions are managed to maintain control and flexibility in the workflow.
It’s important to recognize that business exceptions are not obstacles but safeguards, indicating that specific data or process steps require manual intervention. For example, you may not want the automation to process documents with a value exceeding 10,000. If a document contains an amount like 11,000, the bot can flag it for review via NIAH, presenting you with the full case details to decide whether to proceed or escalate for manual handling. Additionally, you can implement approval steps for further verification before the process continues as usual.
This wiki provides a comprehensive guide to each area of NIAH, helping you maximize the potential of our solution.
¶ The Nexbotix Automation Workflow
Any automation built using Nexbotix is known as an automation process. A process is divided up into multiple phases, all known to NIAH.
Each phase is owned by a bot or a service, which carry out any jobs that NIAH tells them to work on for the given phase.
A job, is a unit of work. Put simply, the job represents the item being automated in each phase across the entire automation process. For example, an automation process with three phases will have a job that could travel between each of the phases, with NIAH keeping track of which phase a job is at, and telling the bot or service sitting on each phase when to process the job.
Here's another example for an invoice processing process:
-
Phase 1 is a document extraction phase, with an OCR service sitting on that phase. The service asks NIAH for the next pending job waiting on phase 1.
-
NIAH passes the job to the service. The job has data within it that tells the service where to find a document for extraction.
-
The service picks up the target file and extracts data from it. This data is then saved against the job, and the job is sent back to NIAH to be moved to phase 2.
-
Phase 2 is a bot, whose job it is to input extracted invoice data into a website.
-
The bot asks NIAH for the next job waiting on phase 2. NIAH sends the job to the bot, which contains the extracted data from phase 1. The bot uses this data to input values into the website.