Currently using robot manager 5 but planning to upgrade it to 6

Robot Manager provides a means for managing your bots and providing work to them in addition to providing the deployment package. I would always say that Robot Manager provides a benefit. Consider your use case of parsing an excel file. If that file becomes too large for one bot to handle, you'd need to manually split that file to provide a file for each bot to work (or three or four, etc...). You'd then need to combine them back to determine all of the work that was done. If each record in the spreadsheet were a case, then you'd be able to use the Pega Platform to track the work. In addition, you'd be able to register as many bots as you'd need to complete the work in a timely manner.

How are you scheduling your bot to start?  Robot Manager has the capability of starting a bot in a particular workgroup (the type of work required) at a specific time. Later it can start that same bot in another workgroup.  All the while you can see what the bot is doing.

There are also new features coming soon that will allow operational reporting (which automations were executed, how long they took to  run and other useful information) and storing of auditing information which may be required for your process. We always recommend connecting bots to Robot Manager.  Additionally, building bots using case management as the base is the most future option and results in simpler solutions.