By Staff Writer
The COVID-19 world we live in today, has seen a rapid increase in adoption of RPA. Organizations are programming bots for a variety of activities, not limited to advancing the collection and analysis of COVID-19 infection rates.
UiPath
Federal governments are deploying robotic process automation to overcome hurdles in administrative processes. For instance, the General Administrative Administration (GSA) used RPA to automate manual repetitive tasks with the help of bots, in tracking the spread of the virus across the USA where the GSA has offices. According to Jim Walker, the director of public-sector services for UiPath, a New York-based RPA platform provider, the GSA employed the use of bots to gather and update their employees on COVID-19 infection data as their anxiety levels rose with the rapid increase in reported cases across the country. The director said that they have comprehensively trained their employees on the use of RPA to create bots for the GSA agency.
In another case, RPA was used to help process the increasing number of unemployment benefits claims by a government agency in Ireland. The technology conducts optical character recognition on data submitted by workers claiming to be unemployed, to determine eligibility. If the test for employment and benefits eligibility turns positive, the bot does a direct-deposit into the individuals bank accounts.
Blue Prism
Blue Prism has initiated dozens of programs as part of a COVID-19 response program, where Digital Workers and services are helping the front lines of the health emergency, across various sectors. For instance, one of the oldest and largest teaching hospitals in the United States reached out to Blue Prism for help in automating a process to remind patients of upcoming tele health visits. Currently, the facility is using a traditional SMS texting solution, which will become expensive as the volume of texts increases to about 5,000 outbound text messages per month. To help curb this, the hospital created a process where a digital worker is programmed to send reminder texts to patients.
And, NHS is using Digital Workers via Blue Prism to automate the change process of the central dashboard used to track Covid-19 in prisons and cells across the United Kingdom. The dashboards are designed to help healthcare workers monitor and administer patients within the prison system by providing access and visibility to Covid-19 data.
The new normal brought about by the novel coronavirus has placed an added importance on Digital Workers needed to automate mission-critical tasks. Jon Theuerkauf, Chief Customer Officer for Blue Prism, explains that as an organization, they want to help the shift to a fully functional and effective remote workforce for business continuity. He says that their RPA offering could have a positive impact. He affirms that most customers and partners have shown a positive response, an indication that we are all in this together.
Another real-world example of how Blue Prism has helped in tackling the challenges posed by the highly contagious coronavirus is in accelerating vaccine development. University of California San Francisco is one of the leading universities that’s exclusively focused on health. Professor Bill DeGrado, the founder and principal investigator at the UCSF Degrado Lab, explores new and innovative technologies in the computationally complex problem of De novo protein design, a vital tool to craft new vaccines and therapeutics for the pathogens.
The process is extremely computer-intensive and entails coming up with the right primary sequence of the amino acids that will fold into the correct three-dimensional conformation that can attach the virus to neutralize its ability to infect. Blue Prism has come forth with its Digital Workers who provide the capability to create new and flexible automation pathways that allow computer-based applications to run in different sequences. It allows Digital Workers to transform, sort, and categorize data using several Artificial Intelligence techniques, shortening duration required to design these life-saving molecules.
Automation Anywhere
The airline industry was one of the most hit with the outbreak of coronavirus resulting in a sudden surge in cancellation of airline tickets. Employees were not able to keep up with the high number of demands that negatively affected customer experience and brand reputation. Most airlines introduced an e-voucher in an attempt to reduce cash outflow. Automation anywhere implemented RPA bots that extracted information from customer emails, opened the booking and processed refund requests. The bots performed multiple validations prior to initiating a refund. This allowed the airline to process 4,000+ cancellation requests a day, as compared to approx. 500 they used handle before.
Automation Anywhere partnered with Microsoft to develop an AI-powered bot that reads handwriting and can pick up information such as stray marks outside the check-box area. The bot was designed and delivered to the National Health Service and World Health Organization and helped digitizing data, at an accuracy of approx. 90 percent, thus enabling quick and accurate identification of trends. In another case, the government of Switzerland needed to determine the inventory of hospital beds and supply of inventories and masks, so it relied on daily reports from hospitals all over the country. Automation Anywhere intervened and developed a bot within days, that automated the national inventory reporting, thus automating the reporting function. The solution saved time, allowing the institution to focus on patient care during Covid-19.
Conclusion
Automation has been around us for decades. The shape and form of automation has evolved over the years. Covid-19 has rapidly reshaped the global business climate. With this pandemic, comes a golden opportunity for businesses to drive change. Identifying opportunities to automate using RPA, is becoming mainstream. The bots allow organizations to automate simple and repetitive processes that directly improve their ability to respond to critical needs. In the new Covid-19 world, as organizations continue to build the best path forward, RPA has proven to be an important ally in introducing efficiency and as a result help businesses focus on important strategic activities.
