Overview

Overview

The RPA Program provides governance and policy to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in bot development to approve business process automation and streamline the development process for the USDA through the RPA Center of Excellence (CoE).

RPA Benefits

The Federal RPA Community of Practice January 17, 2020 Playbook has identified some of RPA Benefits located at RPA Program Playbook v1.1 (digital.gov) page 7.

Why Deploy RPA at Your Agency?
Federal agencies are under continuous pressure to do more with fewer resources. Federal mandates re-quire agencies to pursue operational improvements, greater efficiencies, increased capabilities, and technology modernization. Program managers must determine how to marshal diminishing resources to meet current workload and deliver on aggressive new federal and agency-specific requirements.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) should be a prominent addition to a savvy program manager’s toolkit.

• Reduced Implementation Time: RPA differs from traditional IT solutions in its ability to be rapidly de-signed and implemented. RPA automations are targeted solutions of limited scope and complexity. Because they mimic human interactions, costly business requirements analysis is not required. Moreover, because they are “low code” or “no code” solutions they require few technology resources. Pro-gram managers can obtain significant results in a matter of a few weeks or months.
• Increased Organizational Capacity: Because RPA automates tasks, not jobs, it is an effective means of creating additional capacity within your agency. Employees will be able to spend less time focusing on manual tasks, and more time on high-value work like data reporting, analytics, and operational improvement. Moreover, RPA is an inexpensive means to increase throughput and overarching outputs for critical business processes, allowing an organization to do more for customers and partners.
• Improved Employee Engagement: By automating manual, repetitive workload, organizations can achieve significant improvements in employee engagement. RPA automations increase employee quality of life by removing rote tasks, and enabling them to focus on critical activities.
• Qualitative Benefits: RPA deployments can achieve a host of qualitative benefits including: 1) in-creased accuracy; 2) increased compliance; 3) improved standardization and auditability; 4) lower response times and increased customer satisfaction; 5) reduced process cycle times; and 6) increased measurability and transparency.
• Applicability of RPA Across Functions and Agency Priorities: An investment in RPA technology can have almost universal applicability across your organization. See the chart below for a brief description on where RPA can be leveraged within your agency.

Getting Started

Once your department has identified a process(es) for automation, contact the USDA RPA Center of Excellence at: SMORPA@usda.gov. The RPA CoE will notify the Business Analyst and mission area Business Relation Manager (BRM) assigned to your agency to get the process started.