Aims and Objectives

The aim of the NAA RPA Project is to introduce a Digital Workforce that will undertake manual time-consuming data entry activities thereby releasing our highly trained staff for more appropriate work. This will result in cost savings and/or cost avoidance benefits, achieve efficiencies, increase data quality while endeavoring to remove unwarranted variations from across the NAA.

The NAA RPA project aims to deliver 40,000 hours of time back to the four trusts over its initial three year lifecycle. It will do this by orchestrating and managing a central hub of digital workers spanning the four trusts and undertaking a robust communication plan of stakeholder engagements to identify and grow the automation pipeline. The NAA team will work collaboratively with process owners to scope, develop, test and implement processes under the governance of the NAA RPA Oversight committee, ensuring prioritisation of automations and providing assurance that RPA will not be used to automate bad processes.

Benefits

The following general high-level  benefits of RPA have been identified:

• Reduction in paper- based processes.
• Removal of unnecessary data duplication and therefore the reduction of the risk associated with discrepancies between systems.
• Reduction of the time taken to complete administrative processes, such as on-boarding, payroll reconciliation and employment checks.
• Improved staff morale by freeing up skilled staff from repetitive manual data entry activities in order to complete more productive and rewarding tasks

Key Outputs

• Strategic Alignment to key NHS and Government strategy for digital productivity, removal of unwarranted variation and the What Good Likes Like framework. 
• Increased interoperability with existing Ambulance sector systems such as CAD, GRS, ESR and Trust data warehouses.
• Reduced operational risk. RPA reduces the rate of errors because robots make less mistakes. Avoiding purely human mistakes, such as those made while tired, or by deviating from the process, means a lower level of operational risk.
• Being an innovator. RPA is a cutting edge technology that is dramatically changing back-office operations enabling greater innovation by freeing up human labour to focus on idea-generating.
• Improved internal service levels. With RPA things like internal reports can be delivered faster and without mistakes, new employees can be set-up very quickly, and even IT issues can be enormously accelerated.
• Driving process improvement. In an automation project you often first analyze and then simplify (where possible) the processes to be automated, creating more manageable processes (for both people and machines). For example, if you have 10 different ways to set up a new client in your system, it would make sense to streamline this process first and then automate it.
• Increased output. Automation allows for work to be done 24/7/365 without people fatigue, or quality variance.

Next steps.....

With approval of the full business case, and with a successful funding application from the Unified Tech Fund the NAA RPA project is on course to implement its platform and begin Phase 1A of process development early 2022. Working with our chosen Centre of Excellence it is envisaged that the first tranche of process automations will go into live environments in April. We intend to share the good, the bad and the fails via the NAA Blog very soon.