Automation for Good Community Stories 2023

The UiPath Community is involved each year, and one of the UiPath initiatives that we are echoing together is automation for good. This program was launched in the broader community in 2022. The scope is to bring together use cases that showcase how automation is implemented for social good. Innovation is part of each of the stories from this year. Our way of celebrating the end of the year is by highlighting some of the ‌worthiest automation projects developed in our community.

We gathered projects that generate a direct impact on the wellbeing of different vulnerable groups. Let’s take a closer look at how these projects bring genuine value to the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector.

The first project was presented by the UiPath Foundation, which has a great mission and vision. Raluca Negulescu-Balaci, Executive Director and Despina Donca, Digital Innovation Manager, and many volunteers that are involved, shared their impressive work. They support children living in poverty to take ownership of their path to the future and develop their skill set.

By using technology as a gateway to education, they are bringing new perspectives into vulnerable groups. Through consistent interventions, their belief is in a world where potential overcomes vulnerability. Since 2019, they have reached ‌50,000+ children through their interventions. With $1.5 million invested in scholarships, they succeeded in delivering 90.000+ hours of educational activities with children in future acceleration programs. Supplies, clothing, sanitary products, and food were also provided.

The automation projects were designed and implemented together with the center of excellence team from UiPath. For example, Digital Innovation Task Force program was shaped to support UiPath Foundation on its digital transformation. A paved way to scale the programs through technical projects. The main impact was translated into ‌improved student experience, time, and cost savings. This made it possible to focus more on ‌meaningful activities with the children.

Optical character recognition (OCR) process was implemented for reading ID documents. An unattended robot using UiPath Document Understanding was set to read and process ID and “Income Proof” data. Intelligent document processing saved more than 116 hours.

Another project driven by the UiPath Foundation was dedicated to an end-to-end automation to enhance the student experience. The benefits are connected to student satisfaction, time, and cost savings. They blended UiPath Studio, Orchestrator, Assistant with technologies and API integrations with Google Workspace, Outlook, and Twilio to save 300 hours annually.

How about having a tutor for every child? Azurel is a prototype that UiPath Foundation is working on. It is designed to help children learn and develop the skill set for an AI-driven workplace. The intent is to develop this into a scalable solution to be extended to other educational institutions and schools.

The second project was presented by Robert Wonders, Founder & Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Trestle Academy and Mukesh Kala, RPA Manager at Boundaryless Group. "TechEmpower Ghana - Bridging Futures through RPA Education and Employment" is the initiative developed. Their vision is to bring job opportunities and at the same time to address the skill gap in the technology industry.

Boundaryless Group partners with Trestle Academy Ghana and GIZ Ghana to establish an educational and employment program for technology students. This strategic partnership focuses on how to nurture talent and‌ facilitate a smooth transition from being a graduate to entering the workforce. The curricula is structured in twelve weeks and the format is sprinkled with hands-on practice.

The third automation project, "Foster Family application and Case Management", showcased by Deepak Rai, UiPath MVP, Automation Practice Lead APAC @Boundaryless Group, is dedicated to foster care. Partnership for Strong Families (PSF) was established in 2003 as the lead community-based care agency in Florida.

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) contracts PSF to deliver child welfare services for children who are victims of abuse and neglect. To ease the process of multiple steps, they built an automation that saves thousands of documents in a folder automatically. The robot classifies the case in a specific category. Then it performs file upload based on the case ID and sends a summary email. This way the time involved in the manual tasks is invested in working closely with the children and their family context.

"Volunteer Management Project" by Oyinkansola Ayannuga, RPA Developer, Dipole Diamond Limited and Busola Majekodunmi, Founder, Steering for Greatness Foundation was focused on increasing operational efficiency. Automating ‌communication messages among volunteers to save time from repetitive tasks. The beneficiary for this automation is Steering For Greatness Foundation, an NGO based in Nigeria.

They built a robot to copy/paste Excel files in specific location. As a next step, it automatically sends a personalized email to the volunteer depending on the questions asked. This translated in 80% time saved, that was originally spent on onboarding new volunteers. Also, mentors who were sending repetitive communication manually, specified increased job satisfaction.

"Empowering Indigenous Rights Advocacy through Automation and AI" is a project in collaboration with CRIES, a South American NGO, presented by Goo Yik Wen, Manager, SimplifyNext, Andrei Serbin Pont, President, CRIES, and Nisarg Kadam, Automation Architect at WonderBotz. Their core mission is to take care of the interests of indigenous communities in South America.

The aim is to automate the process of analyzing news articles to detect cases of human rights abuse. Mainly, it is dedicated to indigenous communities to promote the participation of civil society and to implement public policies in Latin America. There are more than 150 researchers and practitioners involved, that promote the model of objective social development. CRIES volunteers watch internet sites across eight countries for 350 indigenous communities.

The challenge was the excessive time spent on ‌case identification and a lack of a proper case management system. The partnership between SimplifyNext and CRIES emerged in an AI hackathon where the prototype was showcased. SimplifyNext's team decided to implement the solution free of charge as part of the automation for good initiative, and the solution is now live.

UiPath Data Service was the backbone for the whole process and it is containing a database for robot configuration, scrapped articles, and incident data. UiPath Orchestrator is where all the robots run and where the incident dashboard permissions are handled. UiPath Integration Service helps send the articles to GPT-4 for analysis. UiPath Apps contains the dashboard displaying all incidents in a list view. UiPath Action Center brings human in the loop for articles which were too long to be sent to GPT-4. Automation Cloud™ is used to enable all‌ robots to run server-less with no virtual machines, and no infrastructure to be managed.

"Empowering Students Through Industry Collaboration" project, supported by Vivek Goel, Country Head, WonderBotz and Satya Ranjan Biswal, Co-Founder & COO, EduSkills Foundation. Under the automation for good initiative umbrella, WonderBotz collaborates with the EduSkills Foundation. The focus for 2023 was to support diverse initiatives as part of a twelve-month program. Twenty-five educators were trained and nurtured across India, receiving a series of event sessions showcasing the UiPath Platform. Thirty colleges participated in this initiative, and trainers were equipped to deliver UiPath Foundation Training to students. Additionally, WonderBotz will provide 50 internship opportunities to students from various colleges in 2023. Their efforts were placed into integrating them into their teams, with more than 100 job offers rolled out for fresh college grads.

A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) is signed between WonderBotz, AICTE, and the Ministry of Education (MoE). This partnership is estimated to enable over 10,000 internships and 3,000 job opportunities in India by 2028. For 2024, they are programming a robot to facilitate student queries. Also,100+ paid internship opportunities, and 250+ job opportunities for students that have completed UiPath training and certifications are part of the main objectives. Listen to more about each of the stories.

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