Page 9 - MIL Connection Winter 2018

employee stories

MIL Develops First Ever RPA Bot for CGFS

By: Kyle Brooks
In late 2017, MIL analysts on the Systems Coordination and To automate this process, MIL developed a robot using UiPath
Implementation (SCI) team were asked to analyze the emerging that reads, selects, and filters unstructured data from several PDF
technology of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and determine reports. This data is stored into memory in a dictionary collection
if it could benefit the Bureau of the Comptroller and Global of key-value pairs for rapid record entry and retrieval. The
Financial Services (CGFS) at the Department of State. Working robot then automatically calculates the totals before comparing
with each office, MIL reviewed current processes in hopes of the Treasury Central Accounting Reporting System lines
identifying optimal scenarios for future RPA projects. These against RFMS/D (DoS’ Disbursing System) data and places the
reviews assessed RPA-related attributes including data inputs, reconciliation results in a preformatted SOD Excel spreadsheet.
decision points, business and processing rules, technical In addition, the robot can identify specific values from the reports
constraints, outputs, and many others. This effort identified over including header totals that are used to populate the final report.
30 scenarios that were deemed apt for RPA automation. The resulting bot was able to convert the legacy process estimated
From these scenarios, MIL selected the Statement of Difference to take a week each month for one person to complete, into a
(SOD) reconciliation process conducted by Disbursing for the fully automated bot that can now produce the final SOD report
proof-of-concept project. This selection was based on a few key in less than 30 seconds. Total savings for this bot are estimated at
factors. First, the SOD process relied on PDFs for data input. 400-500 hours annually. The bot also improved accuracy of the
With no existing PDF scraping technology available to CGFS, reconciliations, identifying historical differences that were missed
users were forced to visually match values from PDF to PDF by the manual reconciliations. MIL is excited about creating time-
that ultimately increased the chance for human error. Second, saving bots for many other processes for the State Department.
the process as a whole was one that staff deemed undesirable
to undertake. MIL knew that fixing this process would be an
easy win for CGFS and create the buy-in needed for future RPA
initiatives.
kudos

Leading the NRC’s MDM End-to-End Testing

On September 14, 2018, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission the overall IV&V test strategy. The MIL team developed Test
(NRC) presented Sr. AVP Karen McGee with the USNRC Case Logs, executed tests (with the assistance of users and/
Certificate of Appreciation for her leadership on the end-to-end or development contractors), and documented the results. The
testing of NRC’s Master Data Management (MDM) system. processing and tracking of all issues discovered during testing was
MDM is a new, complex, highly integrated system replacement also coordinated by the MIL team, which identified over 70 major
for one of NRC’s key legacy systems responsible for license fee issues with the 14 interfaces supporting the MDM program.
billing. The primary function of the legacy system was to create These issues were all quickly fixed by the developers and re-tested
and maintain distinct codes used by all NRC employees to prior to going live.
enter time spent on various work activities, projects, or services Congratulations to Karen and her testing team for securing the
for license fee billing purposes. According to NRC, the MDM overall quality of the MDM system and helping NRC meet its
project “took an enormous amount of planning, collaboration, MDM program objectives on a very tight schedule.
and communication across many corporate and program offices
and regions. Because of the work done by this group, the Agency
now has a robust MDM program that provides authoritative Share your news!
data sources and data standards; this has resulted in improved
data quality, reporting and clarity in both internal and external E-mail us at: info@milcorp.com with employee
processes.” achievements and announcements!
MIL was brought in two months prior to MDM’s ‘go live’ date to
complete an end-to-end test of the data flows throughout NRC.
Under Karen’s leadership, MIL worked with NRC to develop
winter 2018 | The MIL Connection | 9