#Robotics #RoboticProcess #RPA

Krista: All right. Hey Gordon, how's it going today?

Gordon: Great. How's it going Krista?

Krista: So far, so good. If you want to stop sharing your screen, we'll start this. So thanks for joining us. I washed my hair today and everything, and you're looking bright and chipper down in Fredericksburg, Texas, if I understand right.

Gordon: That's right.

Krista: So Gordon, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're going to be talking about today, automated document generation, just before you start.

Gordon: Yeah. So in a lot of our automation projects, we have a requirement to generate documents of some sort and it comes up enough that I wrote a support site article on our website, which you can check out. And so I just wanted to talk a little bit about the nuances around that because there could be a lot of different reasons why documents need to be generated. And there could be situations where actually we find out really, you don't need to generate documents. So I just wanted to talk about the different options that our consultants have out there and our customers have as well.

Krista: Nice. So you get a lot of crazy requirements thrown at you all the time and requirements that don't necessarily actually need to exist. So I guess let's start there and I'll give you the reigns and let you share your screen.

Gordon: Great. All right. So the first thing I wanted to talk about here is the requirement itself. We get different types of requests, like the solution must include document generation, or we need everything in PDF or content creation is required for adoption. These are just kind of some snippets of things we hear sometimes when we're scoping our projects. And this is all well and good and oftentimes there are good reasons for these requirements, but these are not business requirements.

So one of the important things is for our consultants and for our customers to understand why these requirements exist, so that we can best meet those needs.

So this next page is kind of the three categories that I came up with of why document generation might be at least perceived to be required. So the first one is, we need to generate a consumer document, like an invoice or a legal document. So there are certain, especially legal or compliance reasons why documents are necessary and that's a very good reason why document generation is necessary. In a minute, I'll talk about how we can generate documents like that.

Another reason that this might come up would be for either audit or tracking or compliance reasons. Now, this is a case again, where maybe for legal reasons, you do need to have an actual document, so a PDF or a physical piece of paper but oftentimes this is a situation where you actually don't need to generate documents and there are other ways for an organization to prove that they have done things the right way and followed all of those policies and guidelines.

And then the final one is, the use case is basically, I need to capture my process data and send it to someone who's either offline or they're not part of our application, essentially. And again, that's a situation where it does make sense for us to pull that information out but whether it needs to be a document or not is up for debate.

Okay. So now that we have the guidelines here, the baseline of what we're going to talk about, I want to talk about some options that you have for actually generating those documents.

Number one is, you can print to PDF. So all of our applications, we build pretty much, are web applications and that means you're in a web browser. So the easiest thing you can do is take whatever information you are seeing on the screen and press Control P and just print it. And then one of the options in modern web browsers is to save that page to PDF.

Now it may not look exactly the way it looks on the screen and we do have again, linked in my support side article, I linked to another article that Tom [Bouchart 00:04:35] wrote about how to optimize your page for printing. So if you know that someone's going to be printing a page, there are a couple of tricks you can do, to make sure that it prints nicely. And also if you are in the IBM BAW tool, the Brazos Dashboard's toolkit gives you a really easy way to include literally all of your process data with really no configuration necessary. So if you want to give someone the ability to print out all of the data related to a process, I would highly recommend giving that a try.

Now, of course, when we do this, it doesn't look like a typical document. You're not getting a structured Word document or anything like that, but it does give you the ability to share the information you're seeing on the screen with someone who is not logging into the system and might not have access to all the systems that you do.

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