Introduction

Action Center offers a way for business users to handle actionable items and provide business inputs to Robots. It enables support for long-running unattended workflows that require human intervention as workflow execution is fragmented and can be suspended and resumed at a later time after human input is provided.

There are two facets of Actions Center:

Processes—Enable users to launch unattended processes.
Actions—Enable users to provide inputs to Robots, which are later on used to successfully complete the workflow execution.

Important: Actions capabilities in Orchestrator are limited and do not include the features documented in this guide. To take advantage of the new capabilities, use the dedicated Action Center web app. We recommend taking advantage of the new experience, as after the transition is complete, Actions capabilities will be removed from Orchestrator, and so will be the documentation.

Important: Action Center is a licensed feature, you are legally bound to procure licenses before granting access to users.

Behavior

A long-running workflow in which human validation is required is configured in Studio using the Orchestration Process template and specific activities.

Such a workflow generates actions to be acted upon by users on the Action Center website. After an action is human-handled, the execution is routed back to the process, as marked in the workflow by the corresponding activity, and gets executed on an available UiPath Robot. In the context of long-running business processes, this allows for better resource allocation and reduced execution downtime, especially since the fragments of the jobs can be executed by any available Robot.

Once an action is generated in Orchestrator, it is displayed on the Actions page with the status Unassigned. Attributes like priority, title, or catalog are populated based on how the action was customized in Studio using the corresponding activity.

Actions are grouped according to user-defined criteria in Action Catalogs that need to be defined in Orchestrator first and then set at action creation in Studio, using the same activity mentioned above.

Sample process

Say you have an invoice-processing workflow. A user with execution permissions starts a job for the corresponding process.

The job is executed as usually, up until it encounters the activity which suspends it. That's when human intervention is required.

In Automation Cloud, an activity is generated awaiting completion. An action admin who handles the actions inbox, further assigns the item to a specialized user. The user gets notified that an action is pending.

After the action has been validated, the job is resumed and the execution is finished by any Robot that is available.

Since fragments of the same job can be executed by different Robots, the corresponding logs target the entire job progress, providing a summary of the execution beginning with Robots, human-reviewer, and the triggers the job is waiting on.