Global Organizations Turning to Robotic Process Automation to Respond to COVID-19 Pandemic

Organizations around the world are turning to automation to become faster and more agile in the face of increased demand and rapidly changing environments. From managing high volumes of testing results to supporting the increased need in call centers to preparing and enabling a remote workforce, organizations are realizing the benefits of automating right now.

To support this need in a fast-changing world, UiPath, the leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company, is offering healthcare organizations free RPA software to accelerate critical processes and free up strapped employees so they can more rapidly respond to issues arising as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Company is also offering its Automation Hub at no cost to enterprise customers and prospects for one year. With this tool, enterprises can capture automation ideas from their staff to build an automation pipeline that will support new and evolving employee needs, especially as they work remotely. This includes UiPath Task Capture to record tasks and document processes. In the last 21 days, UiPath has amassed 30 COVID-19 use cases to save lives and save businesses, and signed over 100 new customers to deploy UiPath Automation Hub to engage their remote workforce.

“We’re heavily invested right now in helping combat the spread of COVID-19 with the help of our RPA platform and providing our customers timely support as they transition to new operating models,” said UiPath Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Dines. “Never has there been more need for software robots to assist hospitals with huge volumes of medical tests processing, or the public authorities with navigating the welfare arrangements for people in need of timely solutions, or the retailers with onboarding thousands of employees that are needed quickly to aid in the crisis. As businesses face the realities of working in an economic downturn, they’ll adapt their business models with automation, enabling them to scale up robots rather than scale down human employees.”

Responding to COVID-19 with RPA

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, organizations and healthcare institutions around the world are facing extreme challenges – from hospital backlogs to influx in demands to business continuity challenges. RPA is offering relief to overwhelmed organizations, and is already being used by UiPath customers to automate processes such as:

• Managing the high volume of testing requests: Automating the check-in process in the healthcare industry eliminates human error and allows digital paperwork to be processed quickly and accurately, ensuring faster service.
• Reducing wait time for testing requests: The demand for testing is exponential, and in some cases can lead to six-hour long lines. An attended robot can execute a testing transaction in 15 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes for a human, significantly reducing wait times.
• Filling orders for necessities faster: To meet the exponential increase in demand for certain items, one customer is now shipping directly from the manufacturing location to the customer. RPA robots process all orders and enter them into SAP to get the order to the manufacturing center faster.
• Supporting the increased need in call centers: Agents supported by RPA are pulling customer data faster, ensuring a faster call triage process, faster routing to the appropriate agents, and reduced average call handling time.
• Preparing and enabling a remote workforce: Automating the process of registering new equipment for remote workers, as well as associating the equipment to the worker and creating new users for the VPN.

Organizations across industries – including healthcare, insurance, government, retail, banking, and transportation – are using UiPath’s software robots to address the influx of demands brought on by COVID-19.

• The Mater Hospital in Dublin is using UiPath’s attended robots to process COVID-19 testing kits in a fraction of the time. The hospital not only receives patients’ results in near real time, but significantly reduces the administrative strain placed upon its Infection Prevention and Control Department. By giving a robot to every nurse, the department saves three hours per day so medical personnel can spend more time taking care of patients rather than completing paperwork.

• Healthcare workers are spending hours on administrative work to properly add the new patient, record the patient data, and report it to the CDC. To aid with this entire process, one of the largest hospitals in the U.S. quickly deployed a UiPath attended robot, and as a result, hospital backlogs have been reduced, eight to nine minutes per patient are saved, and costly manual errors have been eliminated.

• Because hand sanitizer can play an important role in stopping the spread of COVID-19, a hygienic company has seen a 10x influx of orders. Their team in China usually processes the orders in SAP but could not keep up with the spike in demand – especially with some of the team not available to work due to quarantines. The team added 20 UiPath unattended robots to handle the volume and meet a growing market need.

• An insurance company has experienced a huge volume increase due to the number of staff needs that needs to work virtually – specially in Remote Access Services (RAS), which is necessary in order to be able to work from home. The company created seven robots to support massive Service Now transactions, RAS, and Enterprise Mobility Services. ​Business continuity is now a reality as their teams can serve their customers remotely. ​

For more information about how UiPath’s RPA is helping organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, visit https://www.uipath.com/resources/covid-automations.

We want to help in any way possible. If you have an idea UiPath should tackle, or if your organization is facing challenges during these extraordinary times, please contact us.

About UiPath

UiPath is leading the “automation first” era – championing a robot for every person and enabling robots to learn new skills through AI and machine learning. Through free and open training, UiPath is led by a commitment to bring digital era skills to millions of people around the world, thereby improving business productivity and efficiency, employee engagement and customer experience.

The company’s hyperautomation platform combines the #1 Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to scale digital business operations at unprecedented speed. The company has already automated millions of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks for businesses and government organizations all over the world including approximately 50% of the Fortune 500.

UiPath was recently recognized as the top company on Deloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500, a ranking of the fastest public and private technology companies in North America, and #3 on the 2019 Forbes Cloud 100.

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