wiki:Transport Canada (TC) - Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Background and ontext

Transport Canada (TC) strives for excellence in its corporate services functions, applying high standards and ensuring that Canadian taxpayer resources are used effectively and efficiently. Within this context, TC is exploring opportunities for process efficiencies and productivity improvements, including the use of innovative and emerging technological advances such as robotic and cognitive process automation.

As a first step, TC developed a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Proof of Concept (POC) for the HR Actions and Salary Forecasting processes. This POC was followed by the recommendation to explore further Use Cases.  To respond to the recommendation TC RPA Centre of Excellence (CoE) has been establish.

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic Process Automation is the use of software to replicate the actions of a human user interacting with applications.

Robotic automation interacts with the existing IT architecture with no complex system integration required.

RPA can be used to automate workflow, infrastructure, back office process which are labor intensive. These software bots can interact with an in-house application, website, user portal, etc. The RPA is a software program which runs on an end user's pc, laptop or mobile device. It is a sequence of commands which are executed by Bots under some defined set of business rules.

The main goal of Robotics process automation process to replace manual, rule-based, and repetitive clerical task performed by humans, with a virtual workforce. RPA does not require the development of code, nor does it require direct access to the code or database of the applications.

TC RPA CoE

What is a the RPA CoE

A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a team of skilled knowledge workers whose mission is to provide TC the leadership, best practices, research, support and/or training around RPA.

What are the available technologies?

BluePrism

Appian

UIPath

Microsoft Power Automate

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Selection of Use Cases:

Backlog of use cases established and prioritized ….

Next Steps

Process Interviews: RPA CoE will conduct working sessions to discuss the process at a high-level. Discussions will include high-level overviews of the processes requirements and discussion of pain-points and opportunities for improvements. These interviews will provide context on the process composition and demonstrate opportunities where RPA can be used to meet the needs of TC.

Job Shadowing: RPA CoE will conduct working sessions where the Use Case will demonstrate its process’ The purpose of these sessions is to capture detailed, keystroke level records of how the process works so that it can be recreated as part of development of the automation.

Team:

TC RPA CoE is structured to successfully deploy 2 RPA use cases into production. Team members are as follow:

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