Robotic Process Automation

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the term used for software tools that partially or fully automate human activities that are manual, rule-based, and repetitive. The software robots (A.K.A Digital Workers) follow objective decision making by mimicking and replicating the actions of an actual human interacting with one or more software applications to perform tasks such as data entry, standard transaction processing, or responding to customer service questions.

Robotic Process Automation tools do not replace the underlying business applications; rather, they automate the manual tasks of human workers. They essentially look at the screens that workers look at and fill in and update the same boxes and fields within the user interface by pulling the relevant data from the relevant location.

Purposes Served by RPA

• Automates routine and repetitive tasks to reduce the human workload and allows for time to be allocated to more meaningful work.
• Liberates humans from monotonous, low-value-added work that does not contribute to growth, and reduces human error.
• Helps to ensure that outputs are complete and correct.
• Helps to ensure that tasks can be completed more quickly.
• They work by replicating the actions of an actual human interacting with one or more software applications to perform tasks such as data entry and processing standard transactions.

RPA Benefits Compared to Traditional Methods

Robotic Process Automation Designed as a productivity tool and can be used efficiently and effectively. Specializes in repetitive office tasks, and short development time. The infrastructure supports easy scaling, new builds, maintenance, and monitoring.

Other Tools Designed as general Information Technology (IT) tools and requires good knowledge to be used effectively. Relatively lengthy to build and test. May require additional effort to scale, maintain, and monitor.

The Pay Solutions Branch and Blue Prism's RPA Technology

Currently, the Pay Solutions Branch (PSB) uses Blue Prism's intelligent software and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology for both the Front Office (FO) and Back Office (BO) to process Phoenix pay solutions and business processes by implementing a secure, agile, and smart digital workforce to reinstate trust with government employees and the public.

On November 19th, 2020, the PSB FO successfully deployed 3 RPA pay processes into production to tackle cases and reduce backlog for the Pay Centre. As of March 23rd, 2022, the digital workers have processed over 54,000 pay cases and has saved Compensation Advisors (CAs) over 14,600 total hours.

Due to the successes of the first 3 processes, the PSB is planning to release an additional pay process in late April and has many more pay processes in the pipeline. The PSB is constantly working with different departments (i.e., Pay Centre, Human Resources, Unions, etc.) to determine ways to implement Blue Prism RPA solutions and processes that mitigate potential human error, improve process accuracy, help streamline functional operations and ultimately help government employees by reallocating their human effort to other pay critical areas.

An important detail to note, digital workers can work 24/7 and don't take breaks, whereas CAs typically work 8 hours a day with regularly scheduled breaks. By automating the simple tasks and cases of CAs, it allows them to focus their attention and time on more complex tasks and cases that require human validation.

As government employees realize that digital workers and RPA cannot replace human employees but instead aids them, they develop trust and fears decline.

Software Landscape

Development and Deployment To build automated processes in BP. Through a workflow design approach, we mimic the manual process keystroke by keystroke. BP features an agile, collaborative process. Deployment in Blue Prism is to create a package, export it and import it.	Readability of a Process Blue prism has an aesthetic sense and visual elements. Process flow becomes comfortable and you can resize or recolour the elements as per your choice.
System Integration Excellent options for a system-to-system integration both on the server-side and client-side. Supports REST calls.	Integration with Other Applications Integrates well with day-to-day applications such as Word, Excel and other desktop applications. Provides advanced features while integrating with web pages containing Java and JavaScript.

The Two Main Components of Blue Prism

The Process Studio Essentially, this is part of the application that the ‘programmer’ uses to program the bot. The reality is that the designer module is really a graphical interface that uses a flowchart that ‘pulls’ pieces of pre-programmed Java-based code.

The Object Studio The studio is the part of the application where we build an interface component to connect to other systems. From an integration perspective, we can use C sharp, Python, C++, .Net etc.

RPA Project Delivery Framework

Below is an illustration of the RPA project delivery framework lifecycle – all of the PSB RPA initiatives are to adhere to each of the elements of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) framework model in order to produce quality deliverables and ensure the excellence of delivery.