The General Services Administration has implemented robotic process automation tools to modernize several internal tasks and is offering assistance to other federal agencies that want to improve operational efficiency with such technology.
RPA has helped agency personnel to significantly reduced processing time and minimize errors especially through the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a GSA blog post published Monday.
The Heartland Acquisition Center RPA, or HACMAN bot, has aided GSA employees in managing nearly 20,000 orders and has saved the agency nearly 5,000 labor hours since the software application was launched in January.
GSA is working to adopt more intelligent automation such as optical character recognition and natural language processing software designed to capture unstructured data from images and documents with different types or formats.
The agency expects its automated system to support the processing of 8,000 federal leases that are due for an update in compliance with new accounting standards slated to take effect in October 2023.
GSA intends for the RPA program to spare over 32,000 hours of tedious, manual tasks and is promoting process automation adoption through its Federal RPA Community of Practice.