As COVID-19 (coronavirus) reaches all facets of life, industries, such as healthcare, life sciences, and the public sector, are finding new ways to defend against the spread of the virus and mitigate the impact that could have long-term effects on businesses and the economy.
QC Technology Decisions Inc. can connect you with partners that provide automation solutions to support our customers in navigating these unforeseen challenges.
The economy is taking massive blows, with companies’ ability to function being affected dramatically across a wide range of industries, from tourism and travel, to retail, and logistics, companies are suffering the onslaught of this pandemic.
However, compared to the previous outbreaks, the world is better prepared to address a global healthcare crisis today, there is technology ready and available that can be leveraged to help organizations minimize losses and also reduce the spread of diseases like COVID-19.

Organizations that implement automation will have an easier time dealing with all the nuances of setting up remote work, keep up with similar levels of productivity by relying on automated back office activities, helping overwhelmed customer support staff with attended automation or front office bots, catering to the increase or decrease of supply chain demand, and many other ways that can help them weather these turbulent times with the help of automated business processes.
Here are just a few examples of how automation has been helping during this pandemic:

• Automation of SBA Loan Processing
• COVID Advisory Reporting and Surveillance 
• Monitor the health of an organization’s distributed workforce including self reporting and outreach
• Health screening surveys
• Managing safe return to work
• Processing backlog of sick leave requests
• Manage telehealth registrations
• Automate classification, prioritization and reporting of Email requests​

Hospitals and Clinics were not ready for a pandemic and they need RPA immediately to get them through these challenging times where over 30% of staff are busy with administrative tasks instead of caring for patients.  
Some automation use cases having a impact in healthcare include:

• Doctor availability monitoring and appointment scheduling
• Estimating medical bills for patients
• Processing discharge instructions and follow up
• Record audit processing
• Infection control reporting

Although sometimes invisible to the public, the world's supply chain and accounting processes are significantly overwhelmed, particularly in Health Care and Public Safety areas. This affects both the customers and suppliers!  Some use cases for automation in this space are shown below.

Customer Use Cases:

• Automating Order and Payment Processing
• Scraping online inventories
• Supply chain optimization

Supplier Use Cases:

• Customer Support and Service Desk Follow-ups
• Automate shipment scheduling and order tracking
• Capturing loads and rate lookups
• Integration with customer portals​

Although we are still all learning on how to cope and run our businesses through this pandemic there is overwhelming evidence that RPA can indeed help organizations respond and act quickly to a variety of situations.    Please contact us if you have any questions or would like more information. 

Last one for this series.. "Le Think Tank ?" from the Champain Files v1-8

Public agencies at all levels spend a lot of time responding to public information requests. 

• In Canada, The Access to Information Act gives every Canadian citizen, permanent resident, individual or corporation in Canada the right to request access to records that are under the control of federal government institutions, regardless of their format. 
• In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provides the public with access to federal agency records. A FOIA request can generally be made by any person and to any federal agency. 

Although similar in principle,  public jurisdictions and agencies each set their own rules that in most cases extend to cover any part of an organization that spends or is supported in whole or in part by public funds. 
As part of the process of responding to these requests, agency officials are instructed to make "copies" of all information to note the information that can't be release (e.g. personal and confidential information).  Then folks make "copies" of their markup for record keeping before finally redact redacting.   

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technology can ​provide methods for detection, risk analysis, and de-identification of privacy-sensitive fragments in text, images, and storage repositories. 
In the context of public requests for information, DLP can help significantly with classification and redaction of sensitive data contained in text-based content and images through some simple API calls.   
It's performance and ease of use make it very attractive to folks looking to automate some of their redaction processes.

At the time of writing, we found one solution in the UI Path Go Marketplace that can be added to any UI Path project called "Inysystech DLP" .  Using this package, it's possible to include redaction into your robotic process automation (RPA) projects pretty quickly. Alternatively, both Google and Amazon offer various data loss prevention services ranging in functionality. 

In a nutshell, the Insystech DLP Redact PII Activity  sends a document to the Insystech DLP service for de-identification and in the same request, a PDF file containing the redacted content is returned back.  
Some key features of these these of services include: 

• Built-in detectors that automatically detect and de-identify sensitive information
• The ability to define custom detectors using context, dictionaries and regular expressions
• Automatic de-identification of sensitive data within office documents, images and transcribed audio files

Probably. Data is continuously being received and created, necessitating a data loss protection strategy that continuously monitors data stores for new instances of sensitive data. Data loss prevention software such as Google DLP provides core capabilities that can be leveraged to monitor and control data in near real time.
If you're considering developing a strategy, it's recommended that your strategy covers the full lifestyle of information to ensure that when a file is created, copied, edited, detached from an email, extracted from an archive, retrieved from cloud storage, or otherwise modified, it is instantly searched, automatically classified, and reported upon.
These and other capabilities require some level of automation to ensure that notification, assignment, and data remediation can be performed automatically or manually, according to your workflow process. 

For more information please see the Insystech DLP Documentation

The purpose of this post is to offer a high level look at some of RPA options available to customers to help customers decide what might work best for them.   Please contact us if you have any questions anytime.   

​Robotic process automation (RPA) is the use of software bots to automate highly repetitive, routine tasks normally performed by knowledge workers.

In this post, we've focused on three (3) different types of RPA solutions that are available commercially:

• UI Path - Considered to be an innovator and leader in this space
• IBM RPA   -  Targeting enterprise customers and mature SMBs
• Microsoft Power Automate -  Making RPA easy for business users

Overall, If customers are serious and focused on RPA, UI Path is going to be a safe bet. Although promising, Microsoft's Power Automate does not yet have all the features it needs to be in the same space as other RPA offerings.   For enterprise customers who are serious about end-to-end business process management and automation, IBM RPA might be a good fit. 

Each offering has a number of great features and benefits to offer their customers.   As the competition heats up in this space we expect to see even more!   

Although none of the RPA offerings we've looked at would disappoint customers, it's important to have the right expectation when choosing one.    

Every company is different and we expect that they will look at RPA with some caution at first.   

If you're looking for more information about the products, we've compiled a list of FAQs that might help answer some questions that you might have about them.  

• UI Path Frequently Asked Questions
• IBM RPA Frequently Asked Questions
• Microsoft Power Automate Frequently Asked Questions

QC Technology Decisions Inc. Is not affiliated with any of the companies that were reviewed nor do we have a single preferred offering.   If you would like some assistance choosing the right product, designing or developing an RPA solution please contact us anytime!

"Know your customer!" from the Champain Files v1-7 ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​

"Big Bang.. c'est fantastique!" from the Champain Files v1-6 ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​

"Fall de water" from the Champain Files v1-3 ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​

"Voila.. Cloud Security" from the Champain Files v1-2 ​

About the Champain files
I don't consider myself an cartoonist; However, sketching the Champain files was inspired by a very talented and eccentric project manager from Quebec whom I had the opportunity to work with. He injected humour in almost every discussion while somehow having the ability to constantly cross the line of inappropriateness without ever being inappropriate.  ​