Automating repetitive tasks away at SDPR

Behind an unassuming door labeled “TEST LAB” in the offices of the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction (SDPR), a fleet of robots are diligently performing work just like human employees.

But don’t think Terminator—these robots are actually computer programs running on standard-issue government laptops. And the jobs they’re completing are the mundane, repetitive process work that would take people much longer to complete, taking their focus from other valuable work.

Point-and-click paperwork

SDPR provides income and disability supports to people in need and in doing so processes several thousand applications a month. Whether someone is laid off temporarily, out of work due to a medical condition or affected by a long-term disability, these supports are how many individuals pay their rent, feed their families and pay their bills.

Part of SDPR’s process is to run “due diligence” checks to verify applicant information when making eligibility decisions. The information for review needs to be retrieved from credit bureaus, the CRA, ICBC and various property registries, which requires navigating the sites, logging in, typing in data and copying and pasting client details.

The high demand and critical nature of SDPR’s services mean the ministry is constantly under the challenge of keeping pace with expectations without compromising quality. But the clerical processes of downloading and searching for the required information takes a huge amount of time when done manually—paid time that would be better spent on more substantive, challenging and rewarding work.

Five years ago, the ministry rolled out their team of robots to help keep these mundane tasks from monopolizing staff attention.

Booting up the bots

The new Robotic Process Automation Tool (bots) was developed in cooperation with frontline staff, who provided insights on their day-to-day work to help train the new “digital employees” on their administrative requirements.

The bots are automated programs that have IDIRs and operate within the case management system, together with human employees. These bots are used as assistants, who help staff by accessing and navigating 11 different systems and sources (both inside and outside government) to compile information into a standardized report format on behalf of SDPR users. They exist only digitally, as rule-based logic programs that, to the connected website, look and behave exactly like a human user.

With the bots querying external sources for key information, more time is freed up for employees to speak with clients, analyze the information and make decisions based on the client’s specific circumstances.

A pixelated partnership

During and after creation of the bots, it was critical for SDPR’s developers to engage with frontline staff who had already been doing these administrative tasks manually. They provided insights on processes and systems that were critical to effectively programming the bots’ automated behaviour and assisted with updates when systems or data requirements changed.

Automation isn’t the solution for everything. People are unique and that means that SDPR staff encounter many exceptional scenarios. These bots aren’t used to decide whether an application is low or high risk—instead, they pull objective data from external systems, combining the pieces into one place. Humans then interpret that data against eligibility rules and make a decision. The bots support the much larger service chain, helping to set staff up for success.

Bot to the future

In 2020, the Robotic Process Automation team won the Premier’s Award for Innovation, and they’ve continued to make incremental improvements to the tool in the time since. In their first year alone, the bots actioned 46,000 service requests and saved staff 11,000 hours. New functionality has enabled the bots to contact clients about missing documents and send them to staff once they’re received.

In future versions, the team hopes to take advantage of Application Programming Interface (API) connections to pull the required info directly from source databases (so even their bots can get a break from all that pointing and clicking). The ultimate goal is for these direct data connections to allow real-time analysis and get applicants’ information into staff’s hands instantly.

For now, the crew continues to putter along in that little “TEST LAB” room, silently surfing the web to help more people in B.C. get the support they need.