REFLECTION PAPER

My Journey and Experience

As part of the Travel, Meeting and Event Team I must say that I have a wonderful
experience in this kind of job. I find it gratifying and rewarding the task of consolidating
and managing the aspects of travel and events program of our clients. In fact, I could
categorically say that I am so proud about the nature of my work. With regards to our
organization and with my colleagues I have no problem with them. In short, my team
and I were doing just fine with our jobs when the pandemic of COVID-19 had struck the
world. COVID-19 had an impact on almost all aspects of life and everybody is affected;
rich and poor, the illustrious and even the less illustrious in life were all affected. I
remembered that in the month of April year 2020, the deadly virus had spread to over
100 countries, forcing the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare a global
pandemic breakout. Unprecedented lockdowns, strict travel bans, enhance community
quarantine (ECQ) and “social distancing” measures were strictly enforced by the
government. Many industries that were thriving before the outbreak of the pandemic
have faced significant revenue losses and the growth of their organizations was
severely affected. Several companies across multiple industries have already declared
bankruptcy or were forced to lay off significant portions of their staff.  Inevitably, one of
the industries that were affected by the pandemic was the Event and Travel business.
The year 2020 saw the cancellation of many prominent festivals, sporting events,
exhibitions and concerts in an effort to slow and contained the spread of the virus. Vis-
à-vis, major international events (like the Olympic Games due to takes place at Tokyo in
Japan) were postponed because of COVID-19. In a nutshell, the Travel and Event
business field was devastated.

During this dark, gloomy and down time admittedly I was depressed too just like the
other people. In spite of that, I’ve decided and opted to be productive by learning
process automation system in order to accomplish a workflow or function by using
UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate. It is my personal opinion that in times of crisis
every one of us has a choice: either we will make our self-better or we will make our
self-worse. I’ve chosen to make myself even better and I didn’t regret it in fact I enjoyed
it. The process of learning was very satisfying and productive. UiPath is really easy to
use and learn compared to other Robotic Process Automation (RPA) system. I also
noticed that the speed in which solutions can be created is really incredible. I was
further convinced that I was heading to the right direction then by choosing UiPath. But
why learn this thing? I believe that the business world is growing consistently and it is
moving so fast. Right now, UiPath is the best RPA tool in the globe. Vis-à-vis, learning
something is not enough because as a rule you have to apply and used the knowledge
that you’ve acquired. Before I go any further, I want to add that in learning anything self-
motivation is really important. This is the power that propels me to embark in this
journey. Whereas, the application of the acquired knowledge was the second stage of
my journey and I shall discuss that vividly in the succeeding paragraphs. We are all
travelers in our respective journeys. Some travelers arrived at their target destination
some don’t. Some give up at the onset; some go back and surrender when meets the
odds yet some persevere until they arrived at the top (or wherever it is). In my case, I
am lucky that my own journey and experienced has brought me to my desired
destination.
My Role and Responsibility
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As mentioned, I learned UiPath on my own; I have no instructor. I am lucky that I love
the process of acquiring knowledge. The opportunity to use my learning finally came up
when my manager asked for my assistance in the processing of manual data entry of
City Tiers and ERS Approvers data to a SharePoint list. The ERS Approvers list has
308 cells and City Tiers has 878 cells, we’re supposed to manually copy and paste all
this information to SharePoint site. This repetitive task reminded me of automation
solution, I asked my manager to give me few hours to build an RDA using UiPath that
will automate this task, and it was successful. Instead of a 3-person task, the bot
completed it all in just one run. This RDA saves the team’s money by not having the
RPA Team bill us to input data, and of course it became a time saving mechanism since
there’s no need to copy-paste all the data. It is also the first in-house RDA built by the
team.

Issue That Was Addressed

Manual data entry is an old practice yet surprisingly it is still prevalent to these days and
it is being practice pervasively. One of the reasons why data entry is not widely
automated is simplicity—manual data entry (copy-paste) is a process that requires little
effort to implement. Sometimes people fear the things that they don’t understand and for
this reason they prefer to hold into the old practice. This kind of mentality on the other
hand is counter-productive; it is the common cause of stagnation and stagnation is
contrary to growth. The world is changing and time is running very fast, if we want to
survive, I believe that it is our obligation to be somehow responsive to change; we must
evolve otherwise we will be left behind. This is the main issues that we’ve tackled:
manual data entry versus automated entry.

Key Activities Accomplished

The following are the accomplished projects that I’ve done:

Uipath Projects

Cvent - our Event Management system – most of the bot processes are for our regular
system maintenance which will take a lot of hours if we will do it manually.

a) Cvent Bulk status report updates – this RDA searches for event IDs on Cvent
and update its status in bulk. This bot gives us a Time Savings of 300 hours and
$26.1K of Quantitative Value.

b) Cvent Reports removal from Access portals – bot will remove all registration
reports of past events and run on a quarterly basis. It has a total of 60 hours in
Time Savings and $5.5K of Quantitative Value.

c) Cvent user management – this bot deactivates the account of all the inactive
Cvent users.

d) Cvent library management BOT – this is divided into 2 parts, the Media library
and the Document library. The purpose of this bot is to remove all the past assets
from the libraries. This will free up space for the new images and documents.
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 e) QuickMobile app deactivation – (QuickMobile is an event application) this bot will
login to QuickMobile backend and deactivates all the expired event mobile
applications. It will also clear all the attendees’ personal information from the
system.

Microsoft Power Automate Projects

a) Global portal file upload and EMEIA Portal file upload – both flows have the
same function, it uploads huge data from an Excel file to a Sharepoint list in a
short period of time.

b) Leave tracker RDA – this is a workflow migration from SP2010 to Power

Deliverables

The foregoing software and services (UiPath and Microsoft Power Automate) and their
respective functions were my deliverables. These were big help for people like us
whose main job is travel and event planning.

The Concept Behind RDA

RDA is a great place to start for organizations just starting to automate or testing the
waters. Desktop automation is the robotic process automation scaled down for a single
user. It helps people solve the problem of tedious, manual tasks within their day-to-day
activities. Think of it as having things automatically checked off of one person’s to-do
list.

Robotic Desktop Automation (RDA) tools install on a single machine for one user and
can perform data scraping, Excel automation, file transfers, report generation, and
more. Some examples are: checking a website for information on a regular basis or
automatically pulling reports and emailing them to the correct recipient.

We are living in a fast-pacing world and as I said in the previous paragraph we must
adapt with the flow and evolution of time. The field of travel and event planning will
benefit a lot from this concept of robotic desktop automation. Specifically, automation
service is applicable in many aspects of Travel and Event planning useful in areas like
hotels, restaurants, events, theme and amusement parks, airports, car rental
companies, travel agencies and tourist information centers, museums and art galleries
etcetera, etcetera.

Concepts Applied

The following are the concepts that I’ve used in accomplishing this project. These
concepts were the products of my own personal initiative to learn.
UiPath - develops software to automate repetitive digital tasks normally performed by
people. The technology combines emulating how humans read computer screens (AI
Computer Vision) with APIs, and gives users access to prebuilt automation components

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that can be combined to automate routine processes. Its earlier products simplified
tasks performed using other business software such as CRM or ERP systems, in
internal and back-office areas like accounting, human resources paperwork, and claims
processing. Newer applications for the company's software include coordinating with
artificial intelligence systems to simplify repetitive front office tasks including customer
management.

Microsoft Power Automate – is a cloud-based system (the “cloud-based system” is the

Through the process of accumulation, integration, data analysis and application of the
abovementioned knowledge that I had acquired I was able to accomplish the projects
that are listed in this reflection paper.

The Process of Synthesizing the Knowledge and Experience

When I started learning the UiPath I was then at the stage that I called accumulation. I
learned by studying the step-by-step procedures of UiPath; I did not leap from one idea
to another since I knew that it isn’t wise to do that kind of practice. So, I learned the
basics in every stage covered by the subject matter. Then after the accumulation stage
the second step was the integration process. At this juncture, I connected, related and
unified the concepts in various situations. The integration process was a series of
exploring, identifying and organizing ideas to assess my experience in learning UiPath
in order to solve problems. After the integration process was done, I conducted a
thorough data analysis. I reviewed the lessons that I’ve gone through and compared it
to the actual application. When all the mental works were done, I dived immediately into
the application process to verify the validity of the knowledge that I’ve acquired. By
undergoing all this process, I was able to synthesize my knowledge and experienced.

The Impact of Experience to the Team

The impact of my experienced I believed has benefited the team as a whole. The
projects that I’ve accomplished are now being used by our group. In this regard, the
processing of data entry has been made fast and easy. Aside from that the work and
manpower were likewise maximized and optimized. I believed that I made an impact to
my team because I shared my knowledge; the manager and my colleagues supported
my project to its completion and my projects are now being use by our organization. The
RDA that I created helped to save time and money for the organization.

The Impact of Experience to Myself

The impact to myself of this experienced is not only wonderful but at the same time
fulfilling and exhilarating. Learning something makes you grow intellectually and
emotionally. The experience and the journey of acquiring the knowledge was the most
interesting and happiest occurrence in my travel in so far as I am concerned. It is also
good to feel that my effort was appreciated by my manager, colleagues and our
organization. To me their appreciation really made a big impact on my heart.
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Diagrams, Figures and Screenshots

Please see the following attachments:

a) APAC Data Input for Global Portal

b) CVET Library Management Flow

c) Leave Tracker RDA

The explanation about these diagrams, figures and screenshots are indicated above.

Conclusion and Closing Remarks

It is significant for an organization to adopt RDA solutions to have a better insight into
what their primary business goals are. If the available business processes and IT
infrastructure are effective, then the business can consider RDA automation as a user-
friendly tool to meet their automation objectives. Even if the process, platforms, and
applications are outdated, then the RDA can be used to solve the issues. Overall, at this
age of the digital transformation, robotic process automation is highly required for
companies to nurture the healthy working environment.