The UK's Largest Government Department Transforms Business Processes with RPA

In 2017, the department created the ‘Intelligent Automation Garage’ to deploy digital technology to automate routine tasks, increase productivity, and improve decision making.

Its first task was to bring 17 separate RPA projects together and focus on four pilots. The pilots began in July and were delivered within 12 weeks, achieving multimillion-pound savings each year, according to DWP’s projections.

One automation, the process for new pension claims, showed the potential of RPA. The process was heavily manual, and this had led to a backlog of over 30,000 claims. Shaun Williamson, Senior Product Manager at DWP, estimates that the department would have needed to employ thousands of people and taken several thousand hours to catch up. Instead, The Garage deployed 12 UiPath Robots—handling 2,500 claims per week—which cleared the entire backlog in two weeks.

Our experience suggests the return on investment is around 15:1.

Shaun Williamson • Senior Product Manager

“Rather than just proving the technology concept, the pilots became business critical as soon as they were delivered. We were able to show that RPA could move from concept to deployment in weeks not the six to nine months that people were used to—even with agile projects,” says Williamson.

Speed of deployment is key. Since putting the first automated processes live, the department now has 10 automated processes, with the target of 20 or more by March 2019. The Garage has deployed 50 UiPath Robots now giving a flexibility and efficiency that the DWP could not have delivered before.

UiPath Robots are built from easy-to-use, customizable templates, so the department can create a new Robot in three minutes.

With very changeable workloads, DWP is now able to add 20 Robots in 10 minutes to meet peak capacity.

“We’re continually looking for applications that can benefit from the technology. We’ve proven that you can move from concept to deployment quickly and that there is little cost or no cost in expanding the number of Robots you have available. Our experience suggests the return on investment is around 15:1,” concludes Williamson.