AUTOMATION IN GOVERNMENT

This article is based on an online round table " The Role of Automation in Government” organised by Pointury on April 21, 2022, during which a group of digital leaders met with advisors from UiPath to learn about success stories of using RPA in the public sector.

In recent years, robotic process automation (RPA) has become embedded in organisations focused on enhancing productivity and business goals. RPA is often the gateway into the convenience, speed and error reduction that end-to-end automation technologies can bring to an organisation.

With software robots handling rules-based repetitive tasks that are frequently ridden with human error and take a toll on employee satisfaction, your team can improve productivity, reduce errors, accelerate projects, reduce access to sensitive information, handle irregular workloads, and so much more.

Improved productivity
RPA allows employees to work on what humans excel at, delegating the mundane repetitive tasks to robots. Instead of spending time on copying and pasting information between business systems, employees can devote time to value-added tasks that involve analysis, judgement and creativity. With admin work split between humans and robots, organisations do more with the same number of people.

Errors reduced
Software robots have proven to reduce up to as much as 99% of the human errors in high volume data handling.

Heavy workloads handled better
Public administration organisations may regularly need to handle a higher number of applications to process during a particular time of year. Without automation, they have to onboard temporary hires or shift employees from other duties to deal with the increased workload. Robots can scale up and down instantly to handle any volume of work.

David Burrows, Public Sector Industries Leader at UiPath, illustrated the adoption of RPA in the public sector. Forrester said that about 10% of workloads will run in some form on RPA. About 40% of digital leaders in the public sector state that RPA is one of their key technologies. Gartner predicts massive growth of using RPA in the public sector, very often in using legacy IT systems. There is an upward momentum. In banking and insurance, the adoption of RPA is even higher. So far, most of the use of RPA has been in the back office. Front line functions (government functions) are increasingly picking up. IDC says that modernising digital services for citizens is where intelligent automation expected to grow most.


Public sector scenarios for automation


Governments are having great difficulties in attracting young employees. RPA can help to make the jobs more rewarding by taking over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on high value work.

Sample of public sector success stories

e.g. The UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) cleared the total backlog of pension enquiries in 2 weeks with RPA rather than in 30 weeks in the traditional way. Most success stories have similar massively reduced processing times.

Frank Robben, Founder and general manager of the Crossroads Bank for Social Security and CEO at Smals, explained that RPA can be used tactically where people would otherwise be burdened by “dumb work” or overwhelmed by a sudden surge in workload.
RPA can avoid deeper (more costly) integration or unwelcome, unplanned changes to existing applications. Software robots simulate manual clicks and keystrokes, performing actions and business logic on existing software. Traditional costly and time-consuming automation requiring new systems to be build or integrated can be avoided by RPA.

His opinion is that RPA should be used in the following scenarios:

• Choose simple, structured processes
  • Quick wins are simple processes with a high number of repetitions.
  • More complicated processes might require more complicated RPA workflows and this could reduce the chances of success.
• Choose processes with an “average” volume
  • With a too small volume, even an RPA solution may not have a desirable ROI. 
  • With huge volumes, RPA might require many robots in parallel and thus increase the use of infrastructure and licenses It might in such cases be more efficient to change the underlying applications.
• Choose RPA if the alternative is infeasible
  • RPA can deliver quick wins when it is impossible to adapt underlying applications such as closed source 3rd party packages, external web applications or old legacy applications where expertise is unavailable.
• Choose RPA if the underlying technology is compatible with RPA robots
  • Usually, RPA is able to automate any underlying program (web, desktop, citrix, …). Yet as some programs remain reluctant to being used by RPA bots, a quick hands-on compatibility test is required.

Frank discussed the successful use of the UiPath RPA platform for the Auxiliary Fund for unemployment benefits (HVW – CAPAC – HFA).

• Feasibility: Simple tasks needed to be performed in a payment application. Approved cases needed to be found and each time the payout button needed to be pushed. This was a short, simple procedure. RPA was compatible with the web application. Adapting the underlying application would be costly. Due to covid measures there was a high peak workload and a great urgency as people were waiting to be paid out.
• Project: It required the development of 1 RPA robot working for 1 application. 1 RPA robot could perform about 5000 payments in one day. The robot was cloned to 10 virtual machines to perform tasks in parallel.
• ROI: The project only required 10 days of development and 5 days of maintenance work during the first 3 months with an additional 5 days for project management activities. The result was highly stable. During the first 4 months (peak period) 668,000 payments were automated, saving 222 days of manual labour. This allowed a faster payout for the socially ensured. Even today there are still 2 robots in use.

Jack Hamande, Director General Digital Transformation at FPS Policy and Support, added that for governments it is important to increase trust, reduce time, complexity and cost for the citizen and reduce repetitive workload of employees. The user expects simplicity, reliability and consistency. Governments are expected to increase the level of automation.

Chris Gruwier, Product- and Portfolio Manager at Digital Vlaanderen and Stefan Priest from Atos, explained the why, what and how of a center of excellence of RPA at the Flemish Government.

• Why? Governments have high administrative and repetitive workloads that should be targeted by RPA
• What? The CoE wants to create awareness, provide access to RPA expertise, build standards and reusable building blocks, build a community of RPA experts and offer a platform.
• How? Each entity desiring to work with RPA will be supported during an RPA journey. The CoE will help with
  • the proof of concept to evaluate the feasibility of using RPA (evaluating the quality, complexity and frequency of the process) realising a use case
  • the proof of value to demonstrate the value of RPA and align it with the desires of the entity
  • a pilot to test a single use case end-to-end
  • the rollout to production and training stakeholders

Here are some interesting articles from UiPath:

• Can Governments Afford NOT to Automate?
• Why Chief Information Officers Need To Take Robotic Process Automation Seriously
• The Opportunity Cost of Not Automating
• Enriching and empowering: realising the potential of data-enabled public services
• UiPath Use Cases for Public Sector
• Invite: UiPath Together Event June 14^th