Two and a half years ago, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) embarked on a journey to leverage robotic process automation (RPA) technologies to streamline processes, improve workforce performance, and enhance efficiency.
Today, the agency is reaping the benefits of that decision, a top USCG official said this week.
During the UiPath on Tour Public Sector Conference on April 17, Commander Jonathan White, USCG branch chief for Cloud, Data, and AI, shared the successes and challenges the service branch has seen in its RPA journey.
“We decided to deliver RPA to the most needed customers,” White said. “We have a workforce problem. We have a retention problem. We have a recruitment problem. What does that mean? You have fewer people to do the same or more work. We want to solve that problem of automation.”
In 2022, the USCG decided to start investing in RPA. But shortly after, the project landed in the “Valley of Death,” he said. The lack of funding and governance in RPA made the service branch’s ability to reap benefits difficult. But in 2023, White and his team established an RPA governance framework that addressed those initial challenges.
“After we climbed that mountain, in 2023, we got funding, we got use cases, and we got authority and approvals,” White said.
Since establishing a governance framework, the USCG has deployed bots to several sectors. Overall, White and his team have developed 62 bots and have a total of 320 operating bots.
“We have now deployed those bots across the Coast Guard to eliminate tedious tasks,” White said.
For example, White and his team developed ten bots for USCG’s human resource operations, which allowed previously manual tasks to be completely in an automated fashion, and freed up resources to better growth the workforce.
USCG’s finance team is also benefiting from RPA, and White said the way the team interacts with its financial management system at scale is completely automated.
“[But] then, we said that’s not enough. We need more. So in 2023, we got some more funding and we got some more licensing. And now in 2024, we’re out scavenging for new customers [across the service],” White said, adding that the USCG is currently in the “expansion phase” of its RPA journey.
