Robotic Process Automation
NICE offers a comprehensive Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution and associated services/training/support.Robots provide a scalable,virtual workforce,freeing up peoples to focus on important tasks.Robots assist people with guidance and automation and can automate manual processes.NICE also provides Workforce Management/ Optimisation (WFM/O),voice of the customer,analytics, hosted/ cloud ACD services.
Features
- Scalable, industrialised automation hub capability & framework
- Attended guidance, employee assistance, desktop automation and dynamic dashboards
- Unattended robotic automation to remove repetitive and mundane tasks
- Knowledge transfer & enablement allows in-house build of robotic processes
- Supports building a re-usable component & process library
- Ability to work with structured and unstructured data
- Extensive connectivity options including Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Comprehensive reporting and business intelligence capability
- Desktop analytics to understand current processes and identify automation opportunities
- Extensible functionality for cognitive, machine learning, analytics & performance management
Benefits
- Higher process throughput and faster processing speeds
- Allows staff to focus on important work
- Increased operational efficiency
- Improved customer and staff experience
- Accelerated Digital Transformation
- Improved regulatory compliance
- Reduced error rates
- 24/7/365 scalable, virtual workforce
- Reduced staff training
- No need to change any existing IT systems
Pricing
£150 to £20,580 a unit
- Free trial available
Service documents
Request an accessible format
Framework
G-Cloud 10
Service ID
2 2 7 8 8 7 0 2 4 7 7 3 6 6 9
Contact
NICE SYSTEMS UK LIMITED
NICE
Telephone: 020 7002 3000
Email: gcloud@nice.com
Service scope
- Software add-on or extension
- Yes, but can also be used as a standalone service
- What software services is the service an extension to
- NICE Robotic Automation does not require any changes to existing IT systems in order to provide attended and unattended automation. As such, it leverages and extends any desktop applications by performing actions as a user would but with 100% accuracy and typically 4-5 times faster.
- Cloud deployment model
- Hybrid cloud
- Service constraints
- NICE Robotic Automation uses a Real-Time Client that performs actions in the same manner as a user would, using existing systems. As such, it requires access to the front end user interface of any systems residing on a Windows desktop (virtual or physical).
- System requirements
-
- Robots reside on virtual or physical Windows desktops
- Windows 2012 R2 Server for Control Room & Reporting
- Datamart uses SQL Server Enterprise Edition
User support
- Email or online ticketing support
- Email or online ticketing
- Support response times
-
NICE offers a variety of response times, depending upon the critical nature of the issue being reported and the contract terms. Depending on the impact of the issue, critical issues are responded to within one hour and then longer, lower impact issues within one business day.
NICE offers contracts which have 24 x 7 support, Monday-Friday 0830 -1730 support and also the ability to tailor your own support contract. - User can manage status and priority of support tickets
- Yes
- Online ticketing support accessibility
- WCAG 2.0 A
- Phone support
- Yes
- Phone support availability
- 24 hours, 7 days a week
- Web chat support
- Web chat
- Web chat support availability
- 24 hours, 7 days a week
- Web chat support accessibility standard
- WCAG 2.0 A
- Web chat accessibility testing
- This support is available via the NICE support portal
- Onsite support
- Yes, at extra cost
- Support levels
-
NICE provides 3 levels of support:
* Standard (Monday - Friday, 0830 to 1730)
* Comprehensive (24 x 7)
* Tailored (where the client can design their own support package from NICE).
Support is managed via the NICE Account Manager and NICE Technical Account Manager. Your NICE Account Manager will be happy to provide you with further information relating to the different levels of service and associated costs. - Support available to third parties
- Yes
Onboarding and offboarding
- Getting started
-
NICE Education Services provides comprehensive, role-based training programmes for our customers and business partners, with over 80 courses across IT, business and operational functions. For Robotic Automation, the primary course is a 5 day training course for the Real-Time Designer. This focuses on being able to build automations. It can either be performed on-site at a location of your choice, or remotely via Webex. Classroom courses are also supplemented by online training via the NICE Education Portal.
After the Real-Time Designer course, the participants would work alongside the NICE Professional Services team on project delivery to gain knowledge transfer and to complete their enablement. The shift of activities from NICE to the department can be as fast or slow as you see fit and we would be happy to advise on an ongoing basis and put in place an appropriate transition plan .
The NICE product also has extensive documentation and user manuals. As an example, the Real-Time Designer User Guide has 1,488 pages including extensive screenshots and examples. - Service documentation
- Yes
- Documentation formats
- End-of-contract data extraction
- NICE's Professional Service team will work with each department to ensure a smooth and professional extraction of customer data. This process will be managed by the NICE Project Director, assigned to the project. Robotic Automation reports can be exported to Excel and PDF formats, alternatively the data stored in the datamart and RT database can be exported
- End-of-contract process
- At the end of the contact, the client will have the choice to (i) extend the contract (on the same or amended terms), (ii) not renew (iii) novate the contract to other terms.
Using the service
- Web browser interface
- Yes
- Supported browsers
-
- Internet Explorer 7
- Internet Explorer 8
- Internet Explorer 9
- Internet Explorer 10
- Internet Explorer 11
- Firefox
- Chrome
- Application to install
- Yes
- Compatible operating systems
- Windows
- Designed for use on mobile devices
- Yes
- Differences between the mobile and desktop service
- NICE's automation hub framework can accept work from any channel, including web self-services, mobile apps, e-mail inboxes, digital mailroom and many more. NICE exposes web services that can be called in order to inject work for unattended automation.
- Accessibility standards
- None or don’t know
- Description of accessibility
- For attended robots the interface is each UI 'callout' presented to the end user. These are designed as part of the delivery and therefore accessibility requirements can be met by appropriate design and implementation of the callouts (using HTML). Unattended robots work without any human intervention, and therefore no 'callouts' or other UI are used over and above the existing systems accessed by the unattended robot.
- Accessibility testing
- Interface testing is performed on a project by project basis according to the client's requirements and interpretation of the relevant guidelines within their environment.
- API
- Yes
- What users can and can't do using the API
- NICE provides Web Services to be consumed by external parties. Unattended robots can be tasked with transactions and work using Web Services calls. Attended robots can be called by the robot client API or triggered by desktop events. NICE also provides an SDK to extend functionality.
- API documentation
- Yes
- API documentation formats
-
- Open API (also known as Swagger)
- Other
- API sandbox or test environment
- Yes
- Customisation available
- Yes
- Description of customisation
-
NICE Robotic Automation is designed to be maintainable in-house, and extensive training and knowledge transfer can be provided.
All aspects of the robotic automation for both attended and unattended uses can be customised using the Real-Time Designer. This is the development and authoring environment. The entire solution logic, connectivity layer, business rules and all other components are developed in this one code-free environment. Publishing of automation solutions and assignment to teams/users/robots are also perform from here.
No coding experience is required and the Real-Time Designer training course is 5 days duration. This can be supplemented by practical, project-based knowledge transfer and enablement to support self-sufficiency.
It is NICE’s best practice and recommended approach to create a sustainable business-as-usual Automation Delivery Centre. NICE can also assist with this through knowledge transfer, mentoring and training.
Scaling
- Independence of resources
- NICE's solution is highly scalable for thousands of users and robot clients. It can be built according to specific requirements and scaled appropriately for each client.
Analytics
- Service usage metrics
- Yes
- Metrics types
-
From a support perspective, NICE provides the Wiser Service Portal where tickets can be reviewed. Support and services ticket information on availability and connectivity is provided.
Unattended robots are supported by a Control Room and MI Reporting framework. Reports on usage, cases, utilisation etc. can be produced and reviewed. Attended (and unattended) robots also allow Data Collection to be specified, such that any aspect of the solution can be reported upon. - Reporting types
-
- API access
- Real-time dashboards
- Regular reports
- Reports on request
Resellers
- Supplier type
- Not a reseller
Staff security
- Staff security clearance
- Other security clearance
- Government security clearance
- Up to Security Clearance (SC)
Asset protection
- Knowledge of data storage and processing locations
- Yes
- Data storage and processing locations
- United Kingdom
- User control over data storage and processing locations
- Yes
- Datacentre security standards
- Complies with a recognised standard (for example CSA CCM version 3.0)
- Penetration testing frequency
- At least every 6 months
- Penetration testing approach
- In-house
- Protecting data at rest
- Physical access control, complying with SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Data sanitisation process
- Yes
- Data sanitisation type
- Explicit overwriting of storage before reallocation
- Equipment disposal approach
- Complying with a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v.30, CAS (Sanitisation) or ISO/IEC 27001
Data importing and exporting
- Data export approach
- Robotic Automation reports can be exported to Excel and PDF formats, alternatively the data stored in the datamart and RT database can be exported.
- Data export formats
-
- CSV
- Other
- Data import formats
-
- CSV
- Other
Data-in-transit protection
- Data protection between buyer and supplier networks
-
- Private network or public sector network
- Other
- Other protection between networks
- Direct circuits or secured communications using HTTPS and SFTP are utilised. Data is encrypted during transmission.
- Data protection within supplier network
-
- TLS (version 1.2 or above)
- IPsec or TLS VPN gateway
Availability and resilience
- Guaranteed availability
- SLAs are agreed with the client based on specific business requirements. NICE would be happy to work with you based on the different deployment options available to agree a specified SLA for availability for each deployment option.
- Approach to resilience
- The NICE Robotic Automation solution can be deployed in a High Availability configuration. Certified solution can be configured as HA within a site and Active/DR between sites. In the local site this is by Real Time Server Clustering and DB clustering and between sites by using DNS Alias and Disk Replication. In addition the robotic client can still keep working in the event it is disconnected from the server. The database layer can also be made highly available using the Microsoft SQL clustering product which the solution integrates with.
- Outage reporting
- NICE's solution has an optional alarming and monitoring application, NICE Sentinel, to monitor different metrics related to the system. For example: number of unhandled automation requests, number of requests backlog, failed requests in the last 24 hours, robot average handle time, number of active robots, etc. When the threshold value defined for each metric is breached, the application displays alerts and sends email notifications. NICE Sentinel runs on a dedicated server and provides system alarming, and can also forward alerts to a system management infrastructure.
Identity and authentication
- User authentication needed
- Yes
- User authentication
- 2-factor authentication
- Access restrictions in management interfaces and support channels
-
The NICE Robot Client and Designer supports the following types of user authentication:
For clients:
1. Silent login.
2. Single Sign On (based on Kerberos) integrated with Microsoft Active Directory.
For the Designer:
1. Username / password integrated with Real-Time Server local data store.
2. Username / password integrated with Microsoft Active Directory Secure Communication (HTTPS) between the Client / Designer and the Real-Time Server digital signature of the project files. - Access restriction testing frequency
- At least every 6 months
- Management access authentication
-
- 2-factor authentication
- Public key authentication (including by TLS client certificate)
Audit information for users
- Access to user activity audit information
- You control when users can access audit information
- How long user audit data is stored for
- At least 12 months
- Access to supplier activity audit information
- Users contact the support team to get audit information
- How long supplier audit data is stored for
- At least 12 months
- How long system logs are stored for
- At least 12 months
Standards and certifications
- ISO/IEC 27001 certification
- Yes
- Who accredited the ISO/IEC 27001
- SII - Standards Institute of Israel
- ISO/IEC 27001 accreditation date
- 18th June 2007
- What the ISO/IEC 27001 doesn’t cover
- Our accreditation covers all elements.
- ISO 28000:2007 certification
- No
- CSA STAR certification
- No
- PCI certification
- No
- Other security certifications
- Yes
- Any other security certifications
- SOC for Cloud services
Security governance
- Named board-level person responsible for service security
- Yes
- Security governance certified
- Yes
- Security governance standards
- ISO/IEC 27001
- Information security policies and processes
- All information, security policies and controls are based on the ISO 27002 guidelines. The NICE board member responsible for Governance is Dovi Malek.
Operational security
- Configuration and change management standard
- Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Configuration and change management approach
- NICE has a documented administrative and operational procedures required to ensure that Information Security is inspected in any implementation of new IT system or a change in an existing system, so that only approved IT systems will be operated in the Production environment. This document will be made available to read upon request.
- Vulnerability management type
- Conforms to a recognised standard, for example CSA CCM v3.0 or SSAE-16 / ISAE 3402
- Vulnerability management approach
- NICE's vulnerability scanning and patch management policy follows the Nessus approach.
- Protective monitoring type
- Supplier-defined controls
- Protective monitoring approach
- SOC - security operation center using IBM Qradar
- Incident management type
- Supplier-defined controls
- Incident management approach
-
NICE's Incident management policy is a detailed document and will be made available upon request. The scope of this policy is to provide guidelines for implementing cyber and information security incident response process to ensure a consistent, unified and effective approach to the management of incidents and adverse events with a negative consequence to NICE operation. The policy includes:
* Incident response process of cyber and information security incidents
*Incidents use cases and containment activities
* Incident declaration
The following use cases:
* Data Breach/ leakages
* Critical infrastructure denial of services
* Malware attack
* Ransomware
* Physical events
Secure development
- Approach to secure software development best practice
- Independent review of processes (for example CESG CPA Build Standard, ISO/IEC 27034, ISO/IEC 27001 or CSA CCM v3.0)
Public sector networks
- Connection to public sector networks
- Yes
- Connected networks
- Other
Pricing
- Price
- £150 to £20,580 a unit
- Discount for educational organisations
- No
- Free trial available
- Yes
- Description of free trial
- Typically 1 robot licence per government department for a 3 month trial period. However, NICE would be happy to discuss specific trial requirements.