Automation Anywhere, a global leader in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), today announced intelligent automation solutions to empower governments, healthcare organizations and enterprises to implement remote working and business continuity programs as they navigate the challenges caused by COVID-19.
"The new normal has forced organizations to adapt differently so that remote employees can remain productive and businesses can maintain continuity," said Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-founder, Automation Anywhere. "We are proud to support the efforts of frontline workers in essential services, such as government and healthcare, as well as other industries, while mobilizing the power of the RPA community to address the COVID-19 pandemic."
The following new RPA solutions seek to enable government and healthcare agencies to provide
support and keep people informed, safe and connected across the world:
- Automating the manual processing of World Health Organization (WHO) clinical case forms: In collaboration with Microsoft, the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom is using Automation Anywhere's AI-powered IQ Bot to extract critical patient information to process COVID-19 cases with speed and accuracy for WHO.
- Directing citizens in Macao, China to vital information with a public service dashboard: With technology partner NetCraft, The Macao Anti-Epidemic Real-Time Interactive Mapwas built as a GPS-enabled dashboard using bots to collect relevant digital data and provide real-time information, including infection sites, hospital wait times, and local availability of masks.
- Employee risk assessment tool for managing COVID-19 in Mainland China: Automation Anywhere partnered with IT consulting firm Shenzhen Pactera Information Limited to determine employees' risk of infectionas they return home after travelling outside of the region.
In addition, these RPA solutions empower enterprises across a variety of industries to maintain business continuity and productivity, keeping employees connected across teams and systems:
- Ensuring business continuity with contact tracing:New customizable softwarebots, including theHealth Status Manager provides organizations with the ability to continue operations when employees are out sick, with anonymized aggregated results displayed on a dashboard.
- Enabling hotel agents to collaborate, communicate from anywhere: With increased cancellations and high call volumes at a large hotel chain, bots are now helping remote workers to access data from home, reducing wait time and maintain customer satisfaction.
- Keeping companies afloat through intelligent automation: Through the company's new Business Continuity Automation program, customers are invited to a free one-hour session with the Quick Reaction Team to identify a business continuity intelligent automation use case, and for selected use cases, work with the team to create a bot to resolve the business issue.
- Helping Banco de Guayaquil implement grace periods for loan processing and repayments: When payments are not rescheduled promptly, systems will send late payment reports to credit monitoring agencies. Now there is a bot to mitigate negative impacts on consumers' credit.
Adrian Jones, Executive Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan, Automation Anywhere, elaborated how the company is working through new solutions to empower governments and businesses within Asia. "Across the region, we continue to see a rising number of cases of COVID-19 daily. It has never been more critical to support the efforts of governments, businesses and frontline workers as they look to contain the spread of the virus, and at the same time, ensure continuity and business recovery," said Jones.
"Contact tracing has been a key element in containment efforts, and we are seeing the integral role of intelligent automation in facilitating this process. Through our bots and analytics capabilities, we are helping to trace contacts of infected individuals. We have begun this automation process in Singapore, from data extraction to risk assessment, as we work with healthcare providers and the government to reduce further transmission."
Automation Anywhere is also mobilizing the RPA community to put bot building skills towards creative solutions to fight the COVID-19 global pandemic:
- Introducing a $500,000 RPA scholarship fund for learning opportunities: Individuals looking to learn RPA skills to accelerate the development of COVID-19 solutions are encouraged to apply for a scholarship through Automation Anywhere University. The company has also increased its offering of free online training for users to gain expertise in building bots.
- Calling all RPA developers to collaborate: Developers are encouraged to use the free Community Editionto build additional bots for COVID-19 response and collaborate on the A-People forum.
"In this unprecedented time, businesses are navigating a new normal, with operations and communications now taking a turn with remote working. Talent needs to remain a key focus, with continuous initiatives to engage and to upskill. This will ensure that businesses not only move towards continuity, as workers are skilled to do more with constrained resources with automation but towards recovery, as they move toward business-critical tasks and enhance productivity within their roles," explained Jones.
"Through these programs, we look forward to equipping talent in the region with the skills to build and leverage automation tools for their workplaces. More importantly, to create positive change as we work towards stemming out the COVID-19 pandemic together."
