Procurement Services Pioneers Launching Robotic Processing Automation Bots 

University Procurement Services (UPS) successfully deployed two Robotic Processing Automation (RPA) bots to perform price compliance validation and RU Marketplace user profile maintenance. RPA uses software bots, also known as digital workers, to improve the accuracy, consistency, scalability, and quality of manual core processes. This technology has been gaining traction in the industry and is being adopted as part of core business processes. 

Associate Vice President of Procurement and Chief Procurement Officer Nimish Patel introduced the idea of implementing the relatively new technology to higher education. “Many large corporations have adopted RPA, but it has not been embraced as quickly in higher education. In fact, Rutgers is the second university in the Big Ten to leverage this technology,” said Patel. 

Natalie Mayfield, Shalini Jeena, Sujata Kumari, and Rachel Liu implemented this technology by completing many hours of self-learning and participating in three days of instructor-led training, along with prototyping offered by Acronotics. The team comprised individuals from different areas of UPS, to promote the technology’s potential to have high scalability across UPS. The Office of Information Technology provided support for the development and production infrastructure. 

This milestone was achieved after four months of hard work, learning, infrastructure building, security reviews, documenting, coding, and testing. However, the RPA journey has just begun. The team has qualified a pipeline of processes in multiple sprints for automation and is partnering with Rutgers Business School to give students an opportunity to learn and gain experience in RPA.