NOTE: This article applies to the Aura Digital Workforce product.

Question

What are Work Units? and how are they applied?

Answer

A Work Unit (also called Credits) is a measure of ‘work’ performed by the Aura Digital Worker bot.

Work Unit credits are applied (allocated) to your license on the date of purchase (or date of download for Community Edition). Additional Work Units can be purchased at any time to increase work allowances for the Aura Digital Worker Bots and Drones.

Community Edition - This Edition comes with work units (see product page for amount provided). If you need more work units for Community Edition, you can contact us at https://cognillo.com/support to request additional work units. These could be at no cost if used strictly for testing purposes.

Professional & Enterprise Editions - These are paid Production licenses and have an annual subscription cost. These licenses also include work units, (see product page for details).
You may purchase additional work units anytime by contacting us here.

Additional work units - can be purchased for any of the Editions above (Community, Professional, Enterprise) by contacting us here.
Depending on the number of work units purchased, the cost will range from $0.01 USD (1 cent) to $0.05 USD (5 cents) per work unit. Please contact us for a quotation.

Can you give an example of how much an automation can cost?

As an example, for RPA Challenge automation, which has 10 web screens and 10 Excel rows, equivalent to inputting 10 contacts into a website, costs ~30 work units.

1 work unit is used for each detection when UI is changed.

Details of RPA Challenge Usage

First web screen in RPA Challenge, Aura detects UI = 1 work unit
Entering data = 1 work unit
Page UI refreshes, Aura redetects new screen = 1 work unit
Aura loops and does this 10 times for each contact.

Additional work units will be used if a page is redetected more than 1 time due to screen changes (such as refresh or clicking a combobox changes the UI that needs to redetect to click item in combobox).

How are Work Units deducted?

1 Work Unit is used for every UI (User Interface) screen that needs detection.
- Example: Entering values into a screen with 1 or more textboxes and buttons uses 1 Work Unit credit by default.
- Depending on changes in the screen, this value may increase from 1 Work Unit to 2 or more.
- Each time the UI changes and Aura must detect controls again, this costs 1 work unit for that ‘re-detection’.
10 or more Work Units are used for every PDF or Image file that is extracted from.
- If a command is used to explicitly extract from a file, such as a PDF or Image, then Work Unit credits are used.
- Example: Extracting content and values from an image or PDF file will use at least 10 credits. If the image or PDF file has many pages or the automation uses a command to auto-generate field values, additional Work Units are applied.
1 Work Unit is used for every Web Page that is extracted from.
- If a command is used to explicitly extract from a website page, then additional Work Unit credits are used.
- Example: Extracting text and table data from a web page will use additional Work Unit credits.
  ”Extract from $website” command would extract all contents from a website form into auto generated variable key-value pairs, this also includes tabular data, which are auto converted into datatables (see below).
10 or more Work Units are used for every Datatable that is extracted from.
- If a command is used to explicitly extract from a datatable in a web or non-web application, then 1+ Work Unit credits are used.
- Example: Extracting table data from a User Interface will use 1 Work Unit credits.
  ”Get datatables” command would extract all tabular tables on the screen (or image or pdf file provided) automatically into datatables.

Function	Cost in Work Units	Details
Screen Change Detection	1	Used to detect screen text and controls in user interface. If the UI changes, a redetection occurs and will use work units as listed here.
Getting Table Data / Extraction (Azure Form Recognizer)	10	If user uses the ‘Get Datatables’ command and Azure Form Recognizer option is enabled, this will auto detect all tables on the UI and store them as datatable variables.
Getting Table Data / Extraction (Base64)	20	If user uses the ‘Get Datatables’ command and Base64 option is enabled, this will auto detect all tables on the UI and store them as datatable variables.
PDF & Image Extraction (Azure Form Recognizer)	10 per page	Used to detect all text in PDFs and Images, providing user with key & value pairs automatically. This also automatically creates datatables from tables in a PDF or Image.
PDF & Image Extraction (Base64)	20 per page	Used to detect all text in PDFs and Images, providing user with key & value pairs automatically. This also automatically creates datatables from tables in a PDF or Image.

How can we reduce Work Unit credits used?

You can significantly reduce the number of Work Unit credits used by purchasing the Professional or Enterprise versions of the Aura Digital Workforce product, and configuring to use an on-premises deployment, or a customer hosted cloud deployment.
- Once you have deployed the Aura Digital Workforce bots on-premises or to your cloud environment (such as Azure tenant), you need to configure the Aura Digital Worker settings to point to your on-premises or cloud hosted server(s).
- Typically, this will reduce the number of Work Unit credits used by about 30-50% to give you more usage out of your Aura Digital Workers.

If you need further assistance, please contact us.

What are Work Units?