ESC’s Financial Services Division kicked off the pilot for Robotic Process Automation (RPA) on Oct 16th, bringing in a new opportunity for growth and digital transformation. For the pilot, the DATA Act Reconciliation business process was selected with ESC’s Financial Services division, which was eager to explore a broader set of business processes. The pilot has a target completion date in mid-March 2020 with hopes of quickly building on the momentum it provides to advance a broader automation initiative at ESC. This is a collaborative effort between ESC’s business and IT leaders joining the ranks of other federal agencies, such as NASA, USDA, GSA and many more.
RPA technology allows the business to configure computer software or a "robot" to emulate and integrate the actions of a human that is interacting within digital systems to execute a business process. RPA robots capture data and manipulate applications just like humans do. They interpret, trigger responses and communicate with other systems to perform a variety of repetitive tasks. RPA robots can mimic many human user actions. They log into applications, move files and folders, copy and paste data, fill-in forms, extract structured and semi-structured data from documents, scrape browsers, and more.
However, this is not ESC’s first endeavor into automation. ESC Financial Services division is currently leveraging Enterprise Data Quality (EDQ) software which uses a form of Intelligent Automation that allows them to automate steps, clicks, or analysis currently being done in applications such as Microsoft Excel or Access. It is able to point to various systems or files to read, map, and analyze data based on a set of business rules to report exceptions. These capabilities will ultimately reduce labor costs and increase quality.
ESC is also leveraging core Oracle functionality, Web ADI, which generates Microsoft Excel or Word documents on your desktop, and downloads the data you have selected from the application. You can modify the data in Microsoft Excel or Word documents, working either online or offline, and you can upload the data directly.
These automation initiatives align ESC with the Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals, which are Presidential priority areas that are meant to tackle government-wide management challenges affecting most agencies. Specifically, it reduces the amount of burdensome and repetitive tasks by using automation software. This frees employees to focus on the more intellectual and customer focused efforts. To date, these automation efforts have saved in excess of a combined 15,700 labor hours, and this trend is expected to continue moving forward.
