Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has seen widespread adoption throughout the public sector and for good reason too. RPA is empowering government, education, and healthcare organizations to deliver on their missions with ease, cost savings, and efficiency. Recently, we spoke with a group of experts from UiPath, to discuss what innovation RPA has brought to the public sector. The conversation gravitated towards one particular use case on how the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has employed RPA to ease the workload on its employees and, in the process, saved over $2,000,000.
RPA Delivers Significant Savings
For the California Department of Motor Vehicles, RPA created automations to handled multiple citizen-facing tasks at the beginning of the pandemic. One of those uses was driver’s license extensions. With shutdowns and stay-at-home orders throughout California, the DMV needed a way to extend licenses without creating a financial or time burden for employees. When the DMV looked into mailing license extinctions out, it would cost the agency over $2,000,000 in postage alone.
Instead, the DMV implemented automated processes with RPA that cost a fraction of what postage would have. “We created an online form through SimpliGov that uses robotic process automation to give an online experience, where people could go online submit the information for the extension,” explained Molly Fitzgerald, Account Manager SLED at UiPath. “ Then, our bot goes into their legacy systems where they do not have API’s and validates the identity and validates that they actually are in the window of time for that renewal. The DMV was able to implement this system in two days.”
RPA has a variety of use cases in the public sector including payroll, document handling, resource allocation. Similar to the California DMV, government agencies have the opportunity to reduce costs, reduce employee burden, and drive innovation. Below are just a few ways RPA can drive agencies forward this year.
Improving the Employee Experience
“When technology is sold, the key message is about how it will help an existing environment, like a data center, function better, but we’ve never really considered how this new tech impacts the worker, shared Keith McDaniel, Senior Sales Executive, SLED at UiPath. “In every case there’s a person on the other side of technology who has a job to do, but whose success is hampered by antiquated systems and broken processes.”
“I think about what RPA is bringing to state agency workers; it will enable workers to automate the mundane tasks, like data entry, and free them up to help citizens and directly affect the missions that they care about. RPA will really change the way government interacts with its citizens,” said McDaniel.
Move Away from Legacy Systems
“RPA enables an agency to deploy digital software and automate on top of legacy systems and do it quickly,” explained David Tyner, Senior Sales Executive at UiPath. “Depending on the complexity of the process we can deploy in as little as two to three weeks. The multiple month timeline that’s typically required to achieve positive results and an automation for your agency has gone. At the end of the day, that translates to much more improved constituent satisfaction and service.”
“We’re seeing great potential for automation of both back and front office tasks all across state and local government agencies,” shared Joel Cherkis, Vice President, Global Public Sector Industry, UiPath. “Initially we saw a lot on the back office automations, but now that states are becoming more comfortable with the role that automation plays in their mission-oriented systems they are now beginning to take full advantage of the role that RPA will play for each of their teams.”
“Being able to scale and support agency workers by alleviating the mundane tasks that no one wants to do is generating a lot of interest,” Cherkis added. “I have to say the results are very good; automation is driving time savings, cost savings, and mitigating risk.”
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