RPA Ensures Productive Remote Work, Business Continuity amid COVID-19

As the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic inundates hospitals with new patients, and governments are flooded with new caseloads, those on the front lines struggle to ensure they have up-to-date information and no lag time to save lives and process data.

Automation to the rescue

Intelligent automation is providing more productive ways to work remotely and ensure business continuity during the unprecedented times we find ourselves amid this crisis. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are:

• Enabling healthcare and government agencies to keep citizens safe, informed, and connected
• Helping industries stay operational and productive
• Sparking a race for innovative COVID-19 RPA solutions

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Enabling healthcare and government agencies

Automation Anywhere worked with Microsoft to develop an automated solution to process COVID-19 case forms for the National Health Service in the UK. This was in direct response to a mandate from the World Health Organization (WHO) to provide clinical data and case forms for COVID-19 patients to help the WHO quickly identify trends.  

The solution uses Document Automation, an AI-powered document processing solution, and Microsoft Cognitive Services. Automating the process will ensure accuracy and speed, drastically reduce errors, and improve patient outcomes.

In another part of the world, the Macao Epidemic Information Real-Time Interactive Map provides at quick glance real-time information, such as COVID-19 infection sites, availability of masks, and hospital wait times. The GPS-enabled dashboard was built in collaboration with Automation Anywhere partner NetCraft using software bots that collect relevant data to populate the map, which is updated every few minutes. In just the first few days of the site going live, it received 50,000 visits.

Elsewhere in China, the Employee Risk Assessment & Tracing Tool created by IT consulting firm Shenzhen Pactera Technology Ltd. collects information on employees returning to the workforce after lockdown. The bots then use Document Automation to analyze the data and help employers determine each employee’s level of risk in an effort to further prevent infection in workplaces.

Helping industries stay operational and productive

The pandemic has affected all industries, but not all companies are downsizing. For those that are adding to their workforces, such as Walmart, CVS, and Dollar General, the Employee Onboarding bot can handle the repetitive onboarding tasks to streamline the process.

To ease unexpectedly remote workers, the Slack Login bot provides automatic login to the Slack platform for quick, easy collaboration with co-workers. And, the Remote Disk Cleanup bot simplifies work for IT teams by automatically optimizing workers’ hard disks.

Along the lines of the Shenzhen Pactera use case mentioned earlier, the Contact Tracing bot automates contact tracing in Singapore using Document Automation.

The Health Status Manager bot provides employers with anonymized dashboard status of ill workers so they can ensure adequate staff at store locations. The bot uses Bot Insight analytics to aggregate the information, which is sent to designated supervisors via email in addition to populating the dashboard.

With COVID-19 affecting loan processing and repayment, Banco de Guayaquil in Ecuador is employing Automation Anywhere RPA bots to automatically stop late fees and refinance loans. In this way, it’s preventing late payment reports from being sent to credit monitoring agencies, providing one less thing for customers to worry about.

Automation Anywhere has also developed a Business Continuity Automation program, which offers customers one hour of a free consultation with our Quick Reaction Team to talk through ways to ensure business continuity. Through this program, bots or Digital Workers are customized to address the specific needs.

Sparking a race for COVID-19 RPA solutions

There’s much more we can do to fight COVID-19 together. For that reason, Automation Anywhere is mobilizing the RPA bot-building community to put their skills to work for a worthy cause: creative solutions to the coronavirus outbreak and business impact.

We’ve introduced a global $500,000 RPA scholarship program to accelerate the development of COVID-19 solutions through Automation Anywhere University RPA courses. We’re also offering more free online training courses to help those who want to learn RPA get up to speed quickly. Additionally, the RPA Advanced Certification program is free through June 30, 2020.

Developers are urged to use Community Edition to build and test bots for COVID-19 response, including creating bots to help people work from home. They can also join the discussion in the A-People online RPA community to help come up with new ways to use RPA.

COVID-19 has upended life as we knew it. But, by coming together to find creative solutions to the new issues we face — and by employing intelligent automation to handle mundane, repetitive tasks — we can overcome COVID-19 together and emerge stronger than we were before.