University of Melbourne Uses RPA for Grants

Leveraging existing automation accelerates emergency bot build.

After a quick scoping meeting on Zoom and a few e-mail exchanges with colleagues in Scholarships & Bursaries and Finance, the RPA team came up with a process that would release payments to students at a quicker rate than the traditional method.

The bots at the University are developed in a modular way as single features. As 90% of features were already built from previous automation requests, it only took 2 days to combine them and build any new elements required to complete the task.

Download case study

Customer Quote

What we proved during this time was we didn’t need to be in the office to implement any RPA solution. Developers could stay home and develop.

Shiv Chandra
Robotic Process Automation Manager

Customer achievements.

Customer Achievements

4,500

Hours saved in processing time

4,000+

Grants approved to date

Weekly payments compared to every 2 weeks prior

Delivering rapid financial aid while saving time with intelligent automation.

Tools such as Microsoft SQL are used to feed information to different bots, linking them together to create a workflow. Based on machine capacity and availability, work is automatically allocated to different machines to process the records. To enable existing bots for the emergency student funding use case, only some minor changes were required.

Prior to the COVID-19 emergency, financial aid payments for students were issued every two weeks. Automation enabled a much faster processing time, with payments issued three times a week. Another advantage of using a bot was that it had the ability to validate a student’s banking details prior to payments. This resulted in a reduction of re-work.

Processes automated.

Emergency financial aid processing and payments

Applying automation to address new needs arising from the pandemic.

The University is currently investigating other use cases where RPA can be implemented to help during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Customer Quote

The bot has been a godsend for the scholarships office, drastically reducing our workload and ensuring students get paid their COVID-19 grants in a much quicker time frame then we would otherwise be able to do.

Senior Scholarships Coordinator, Scholarship & Bursaries

Customer overview.

The University of Melbourne is one of Australia’s oldest and most reputable tertiary institutions. Located in the heart of Melbourne, the university’s main campus enrolls close to 50,000 students in law, business, arts, media, economics, and engineering. The school partners with leading institutes and research centers and has been recognized as one of the world’s top 50 universities.