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RPA at The Joint Munitions Command

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The Joint Munitions Command (JMC) is the latest in a series of commands since World War II that have managed the ammunition plants of the United States. Since 1973, those commands have been headquartered on Rock Island Arsenal. Here are a few related questions answered by Ron Jones, Senior Director for Technology Strategy at Blue Prism Government Solutions.

What is overlooked in government IT regarding automation?

Security is probably the biggest thing. I mean there’s a new shiny object everybody’s chasing the ball in a soccer field and it’s highly publicized. There’s a lot of hype on all types of automation tools – RPA, BPM. Everyone gets these things installed and realizes that vulnerabilities that should have been accounted for in the beginning aren’t accounted for and you have incidents that pop up and you have to go back to zero and you lose confidence in your entire program.

What is the difference between robotic task automation and robotic process automation?

Robotic process automation is strategic, is transformational, it involves large numbers of stakeholders and it’s scalable, it’s enterprise-grade. What I like to call robotic task automation is more so focused on tactical level problems. So you’re talking about a single process or a single task that one person or a couple of people may take part in. It more than likely is going to involve a tool that runs on someone’s desktop, less security accreditation procedures need to be accounted for because it’s being deployed in such an isolated manner.

How has the Joint Munitions Command been successful with RPA?

What we’re doing for them is helping them operationalize machine learning and AI to meet the needs of the mission. One of the examples of that is one of the automations they have an introduction to deal with what we call a zero-fill issue. When inspections are taking place, there are sometimes errors that result from human input. So people are manually putting in values and putting inspection data for munitions. And that impacts readiness because you can’t send munitions out to where they need to be without a proper inspection being able to validate that inspection. So that’s one of the many things we’re helping them with. But overall they have a very ambitious strategy to utilize AI and machine learning to meet their mission needs.

Why does the goverment need automation?

I think that the biggest thing that we see – as folks in the government are getting introduced to automation, RPA specifically, we’re seeing that job satisfaction goes up. A lot of federal employees lament the fact that they’re doing a lot of things that they weren’t brought on to do – these are mundane repetitive tasks that don’t require a lot of human ingenuity and creativity. And so I would say, the biggest benefit that I’m seeing is that job satisfaction for federal employees goes up when you introduce something like robotic process automation.

How does Blue Prism allow the goverment to perform true robotic process automation?

Blue Prism enables true robotic process automation by offering an enterprise-grade solution, we call it connected RPA. Blue Prism’s connected RPA platform is based on a few key tenets. So we’ve got security, audit ability, and scale. We were born in the regulated industries – banking, finance, insurance and we have 20 years of experience doing this. We know what the government’s needs are and what good looks like. And beyond just the software, there’s an entire philosophy behind what we do, based on a proprietary robotic operating model which is essentially a playbook on how to perform enterprise RPA a scale. We think, based on those things, we have the experience and the toolset to deliver on true robotic process automation in the federal government.