Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software company UiPath is donating RPA software to healthcare and public sector organisations across South Africa, until the end of September, 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.

“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.

"Never has there been [a greater] need for software robots to assist hospitals with huge volumes of medical test 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,” says UiPath co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines.

As the pandemic continues, organisations and healthcare institutions around the world are facing extreme challenges – from hospital backlogs to influx in demand and business continuity challenges.

Therefore, RPA is offering relief to overwhelmed organisations, and is already being used by UiPath customers to automate processes, the company says.

One of the ways RPA is being used is managing the high volume of testing requests. By automating the check-in process in the healthcare industry, this eliminates human error and allows digital paperwork to be processed quickly and accurately, ensuring faster service.

RPA is also being used to reduce wait time for testing requests. With the demand for testing exponential, and with long queues, an attended robot can execute a testing transaction in 15 seconds, down from 2.5 minutes for a human, significantly reducing wait times.

RPA can also fill 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 centre faster, says UiPath.

Moreover, RPA is also supporting the increased need in call centres. 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, reports the company.

Another example is preparing and enabling a remote workforce, by automating the process of registering new equipment for remote workers, as well as associating the equipment to the worker and creating new users for a virtual private network.

UiPath indicates that organisations 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.