r/rpa

I build and maintain the automations for a clinic group across five sites. Thing is the clinical system is on prem, the vendor has no api yet, and the answer since last year has been that it's on the roadmap. so therapists retype session notes into the patient record by hand, close to an hour a day each. i built the bridge in uipath and parts of the app expose proper ui automation selectors and that leg is fine. the notes screen is a rendered surface where selectors are useless, so that half runs on cv activities with image anchors. it works until the vendor ships a patch, then the anchors drift and i'm in there rebuilding. third time this year.

What i'm trying to work out is whether anything in this category genuinely survives a patch cycle or whether we all just accept the rebuild as the running cost. Power automate desktop hit the same ceiling when i tested it, same dependency on how the screen looked when you recorded. Askui came up because the task is written as plain steps resolved at run time rather than a recorded path or a stored anchor, so in theory a moved button isn't a break. i haven't put it against our patch cycle yet so that's still a claim rather than a result. one hard constraint either way is that patient data can't leave our network, which rules out anything cloud-only.

For anyone automating an app with no dom and no api, what's your maintenance cadence after a vendor update, and has anything reduced it?

Client has a windows desktop app, no API, data cant leave the machine. They want it unattended on their PC.

What do you actually ship?

1. UiPath / Power Automate robot + Orchestrator
2. Python or PowerShell + Task Scheduler on their box
3. Something else???

The part I’m stuck on isn’t the first build. Its running it after i'm gone without a per bot license and without standing Teamviewer.

if u did this for a real client, what held up?

I keep seeing automation projects start with “this is repetitive, let’s automate it” and then get way messier once someone actually looks at the full process. There are exceptions, spreadsheet checks, manual approvals and little workarounds nobody mentioned because they’re just part of the day-to-day.

That’s what got me looking at process discovery software. UiPath comes up a lot, and I’ve also seen Mimica and Skan AI mentioned on the discovery side.

I’m less interested in getting another process map and more interested in whether these tools actually change what teams decide to automate. For people doing RPA at scale, has discovery software helped you find better candidates than workshops and interviews alone?

Hi there, recently i am trying to use ig to outreach more leads for my small brand, ofc other social media will be included in my plans later. 
My office is totally a solo type,  and I just find myself spending too much time on these repeating routine tasks——post some content, reply to comments, answer DMs, and slowly build a community …, barely no extra time to find new customers. 
So I plan to save time on mass broadcasting for my brand, using an automatic way for 
broader reach, let’s the tool to help me share information about new product listings, promotional ads, coupons, etc... and this can also be a good way to bring me more leads. i've tried some chatbots tools but their plans always come with messaging credit limits, which makes it easier to cost me too much over budgets. So I wanna know if there are any good solution that can help auto broadcast to ig contacts safely
well, I’m not very technical, so I'd prefer to skip any overly complicated options. pls lmk what tools or workflow are u using for auto-dm on ig? 
thx for suggestions in advance