What Government Agencies Need to Know Before Deploying RPA/IA
Automation has come to the U.S. public sector. Over the past several months, federal agency adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) has accelerated, reducing man-hours by automating mundane, time-consuming tasks. This, in turn, is enabling employees to prioritize more pressing and higher-value work.
Aeyon has been driving automation deployments to support financial management, system migrations, logistics and mission services for the Army, Marines and the Navy. We’ve also seen RPA deployments by the General Services Administration (GSA) to improve its acquisition process and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to save time on drug intake forms.?
As automation demonstrates ROI across the U.S. public sector, a key challenge for agency leaders isn’t?whether?to start an RPA project, but?where and how?to start it. Automation is a broad capability with a growing set of use cases, which means it can be imposing for agency leaders to, initially, get their arms around where their automation journey should begin. Typically, agencies look to RPA or Intelligent Automation (IA).
RPA uses automated bots guided by scripted actions that tell them to do process B once process A is complete. These software bots are trained on how to do something and rely on structured data to complete tasks. Intelligent automation, on the other hand, can interpret data and make conclusions from that data set.?
RPA processes are consistently deployed to improve financial reporting capabilities to achieve clean audits while IA is frequently used in logistics to improve supply chain efficiency to identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks before they even happen.
In my recent?FEDWeek guest article, I focused on a set of six core RPA/IA journey strategies for federal agency leaders to maximize their automation investments. Here, I’ll quickly recap those strategies, then dive deeper into Aeyon’s automation capabilities.?
Do not get seduced by the promises of what automation?could?deliver. Instead, evaluate what tangible improvements it?will?deliver to an agency. Agencies with a high volume of data would benefit greatly from RPA and IA.
2. Know What To Expect
By utilizing RPA, business process owners can automate monotonous tasks and free up time to dedicate to more pressing work. This results in fewer errors than manual inputs and improves the employee experience given the faster processing.?
领英推荐
3. Ensure Professional Development Is Available for New Technologies
Automation is often incorrectly associated with replacing employees’ jobs. With the right professional development, however, employees become more familiar with the technology and gain a greater sense of how to use automation to become more productive and valuable to the organization.
4. Align Administration Work with Technological Innovation?
Employees will recognize quickly how much difference automation will make in their day-to-day work lives. By applying technological innovation to mundane administration work, employees will boost their productivity and be able to take on more rewarding tasks.?
5. Prioritize Transparency
The development and deployment of RPA and IA must, first and foremost, be done transparently. Transparency builds trust among employees. They should trust that automation will enhance their jobs, not take them away.
6. Establish/Leverage Automation Centers of Excellence
Agencies embarking on automation projects do not want to recreate the wheel for every RPA/IA opportunity; there is significant value in building a repeatable foundation for success that can scale rapidly and be tailored to future cases. This foundational approach is enabled through the use of Centers of Excellence (CoE).?
Aeyon is at the forefront of leveraging CoEs for agency automation projects and supporting agencies with the launch or management of their CoEs. These resources bring together innovative solutions based on subject matter experts’ previous experiences. The result: forward-thinking, best-value automated solutions that are easily scaled up or down to meet specific agency and unit needs.?
Aeyon is home to both a Robotic Operations Center of Excellence and a Data Analytics Center of Excellence. Once a client chooses to work with us, Aeyon develops tailored solutions from both CoEs to deliver cost savings, efficiency improvement and digital transformation for multiple systems and processes within the client’s business.
To learn more about how Aeyon can help your organization get started on its automation journey, visit https://aeyon.us/centers-of-excellence/.