Deloitte Uses UiPath and ServiceNow to Support Government Agencies with Digital Labor PMO Tools

Deloitte, a leading professional services firm, saw an opportunity to better serve its clients using UiPath robotic process automation (RPA) to align business processes with mission requirements. By partnering with ServiceNow, the firm built out a new product offering that delivered immediate results to its government customers. 

Maintaining productivity has become a growing challenge during the pandemic, especially for state and federal agencies. Working remotely, government workers are increasingly asked to do more with less. In response to constant budget pressure and the need to find new ways to improve worker efficiency, agencies are embracing a fresh approach—using digital labor to fill the gaps with help from a new digital program management office (PMO)—built on ServiceNow and deployed by Deloitte. 

Deloitte, a multinational professional services firm, is leveraging RPA to expand its service offerings, and accelerate projects to deliver a faster ROI—in particular those in the public sector. Many agencies are bogged down with highly manual processes and insufficient personnel to keep up with creating backlogs of paperwork and detracting from focusing on mission objectives. Deloitte's consulting services are providing agency staff with UiPath Robots that tirelessly undertake the most repetitive and mundane tasks. By freeing up each employee to concentrate on interesting, high-value activities, government agencies are clearing their backlogs and improving morale at the same time. 

The past few months have shown it's important for organizations to consider how digital labor factors into their workforce of the future. 

Bev McDonald • Specialist Executive, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Digital labor expands work capacity

The crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic was an ideal proving ground for customer products that include new RPA workflows and pre-packaged software robots. For example, when the pandemic unemployment rate reached 3.3 million in one week—exceeding the previous record of 695,000 set in October 1982—the flood of claims overwhelmed the system and vital paperwork was unprocessed for weeks. The delay in benefits created real hardships for claimants relying on government benefits. 

With help from digital labor, agencies can now increase the amount of work they can handle, even with labor shortages. RPA bots can help streamline operations in several ways, including: augmenting call center claims processing with chatbots, processing paper claims faster in digital formats, and validating claims, invoices, and other paperwork and checking against policies. 

Bringing RPA to its government customers has been a win-win: agencies can do more with less, workloads are refocused on mission objectives, employee morale has improved, all while Deloitte diversifies its service offerings with digital labor.                  

To build this enterprise capability and enable digital workforce transformation, an investment in governance and infrastructure is needed. 

Edward Rollins • Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Developing a digital labor PMO tool

Building your own RPA bots is one thing, but designing an RPA offering for your customers to manage their digital labor force themselves is another matter altogether. The Deloitte team knew it could build its own RPA products using UiPath that would meet two important requirements to gain traction with government agencies: seamless integration with existing systems and a centralized management platform to oversee every automation. 

To address both of those concerns, Deloitte leaned on its existing relationship with ServiceNow. Creating a program management office (PMO) would be critical to help government customers oversee automations and scale-up RPA as needed. ServiceNow provides a PMO platform that is ideally suited for RPA applications, enabling users to easily manage and track bots and tasks.

Any decision-masking cycle is broken into four phases: observe, orient, decide, and act. In developing a digital labor PMO tool, the Deloitte team recognized that they needed to create automations that would focus on the first two lower-level stages—observe and orient—leaving the workforce to focus on higher-level stages—decide and act. Employing digital workers to triage decision making returned multiple benefits, including 80% improvement in processing time, a throughput increase of three to five times, 300% increase in work capacity, and 99.9% accuracy rates. 

ServiceNow's digital PMO integrates with a variety of other systems to bring RPA to every corner of the organization. Deloitte stakeholders were especially excited about this capability because augmenting agency workforces often happens on an as-needed basis to meet surges in demand and workload.

One of Deloitte's public-sector customers recently had to put that theory into practice when fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic strained available resources and threatened to disrupt normal operations as staff transitioned to a remote work environment. Deloitte's digital labor bots quickly picked up the slack, conducting everyday, rules-based tasks that could have otherwise overwhelmed employees in a crisis.

In a single month, those software robots processed more than 2,000 transactions related to more than 100 invoices. By the customer's estimate, the RPA bots completed tasks in less than 11 hours that would have taken staff more than 500 hours. 

With that proof of concept in hand, Deloitte and ServiceNow have continued to expand their RPA and PMO offerings to other members of the public sector. 

More than anything else, this success story shows what's possible when leading service providers come together to pool their shared capabilities and deliver a better service. In this case, the combination of ServiceNow's PMO platform and Deloitte's professional services paved the way for government agencies to navigate a seemingly impossible situation and support workers during an unprecedented crisis with digital labor.

We are looking forward to what comes next with this partnership.

An organization needs to focus not on the one use case that digital labor can solve for, but the thousands of use cases it can solve for.

Edward Rollins • Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP