Developing Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Business Enterprise Systems Product INnovation (BESPIN) has a national defense-related mission need in the area of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Specifically, a holistic and agile solution driven by innovation, that delivers a scalable end-to-end RPA, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) automation approach is needed to enable our Warfighter’s to become operationally resilient and focus on higher-level tasks. In the past RPA was used by commercial organizations to streamline back-office burdens by removing monotonous tasks, therefore speeding up the supply chain and providing a more effective use of manpower. Today, our Warfighter’s are facing a manpower intensive environment coupled with unprecedented workloads, and a confluence of remote challenges. Currently, the BESPIN Digital University (Digital U) education platform transforms the way 18,000 users complete technical training. Further, Digital U is challenged by an expensive siloed automation that is currently relying on a large scale of people for general knowledge and process functions. Therefore, we believe the technology development under the subject SBIR topic may eventually contribute to solving a mission need. The main goal of our involvement in this project is to provide a holistic and agile RPA+AI solution that allows robotic automation to be a strategic enabler for Digital U, by leveraging data services and end-to-end process and efficiency for our Warfighters. This innovative solution will reduce human intervention, improve task execution efficiency, and drastically decrease labor and operational costs. The mission impact of this project on the Air Force and the DoD will position BESPIN to develop and implement a series of bots designed to automate transactional, rule-based human tasks by mimicking user interactions without any intervention. These robots will implement algorithms to not only complete human repetitive tasks, but reduce errors and downtime, and increase the return on investment (ROI).