Automation

Project Completed

Problem Statement

Within the hiring process for staff, academic, and student populations, process inefficiencies and redundancies, data entry errors, resource constraints, and/or other issues exist that prevent hire appointment information from being entered into the UCPath HR information system punctually, which then impacts the hire's systems access and pay. This could prevent an employee from being productive, which then leads to wasted dollars and time for the university. There is a critical need to implement Automation tools that will help streamline these processes and reduce turnaround time in order to ensure accurate, timely pay and systems access for hires. Examples of inefficiencies include re-keying data from one form to another, redundant approvals in different systems or in UCPath, unnecessary reprocessing actions, and inconsistencies in processing between transactional staff both at UC Berkeley and at the UCPath Center.

Business Case

As department budgets grow thinner and resources are more constrained, there is much less time and much fewer staff to do manual work when an appointment needs to be transacted or to re-work/reprocess actions when something doesn't go right. More than ever, it's critical for staff to do less with less, and the key to achieving this is Automation.

Objectives

The objectives of this process include Automating as much and as many hiring transactional activities from one department to another, including the entry of hire requests to sending online documents to new hires to keying in their information to the HR system. Automation can consist of online desktop software called "Bots" that mimic and emulate keystrokes, setting up rules and triggers in online systems to expedite processes, or bypassing redundant steps through "Mass Uploading" data directly into the UCPath system. The major objectives of this project include: Staff and Student Hiring Bots, Summer Sessions Hiring Bots, Summer Salary Hiring Bots, Welcome Email Bots, ASE/GSR Mass Upload, Summer Salary Mass Funding Upload, and more...

Success Metrics

  • Reduce UCPath transactional entry time to take less time than it would to manually key each transaction (Example: 30 minutes to transact one hire versus 10 minutes)
  • Reduce the number of people it takes to process the same number of transactions (Example: 1 person to do 100 transactions a week versus 2 people)
  • Reduce turnaround time to process a transaction (Example: 3 days to approve a request through the UCPath Center versus 24 hours; 2 days to send a Welcome email versus 24 hours; 48 hours to move signed DocuSign files from one folder to another versus instantaneous)

Project Leaders

  • Sponsor: Marc Fisher
  • Project Manager: Janet Speer
  • Technical Lead: Janet Speer

For more information on this project, contact:

Prior Accomplishments

Project accomplishments from prior months are noted here.

DateAccomplishments
Nov 2021
  • There are numerous workstreams on the project that include various areas of hiring automation, including the use of "bot" computer software to emulate manual, transactional activities and keystrokes as well as bypassing manual approval steps through mass uploading into UCPath. Therefore, the key milestones for each activity can be granular. 
  • Bots - Ready for Use:
    • Staff New Hire
    • Summer Salary Concurrent Hire
    • Summer Sessions Concurrent Hire
  • Both the Bots and Mass Upload workstreams have entered various stages of process design, development, or testing. For the full updates of each workstream, click here
Oct-Dec 2020 Bots continue to be created, updated, revised, tested, and scaled. The Mass Upload effort is also under way, with two major testing workstreams: 1) New/Rehires who are required to complete hiring paperwork and 2) Concurrent Hires who do not have any hiring paperwork. The latter can go directly from request to UCPath with minimal touchpoints with the employee. Testing and documentation is already under way with much success. For New/Rehires, this one requires many integrations and technical work... from Smartsheet to DocuSign to Perceptive Content and Papervision and then to UCPath and back to BRS. Because of this, the effort will require work from IST and many iterations of testing, and for these reasons, this may be a rather large obstacle to completing this track of work in 2021.
Jul-Sep 2020 Used Automation to successfully and expeditiously transact hundreds of Concurrent Summer Sessions appointments for the SHARE region and New Hires for the BEARS region in a fraction of the time and resources it used to take.

Risk/Issue History

Project risks and issues that have been resolved or closed are noted here. 

DateRisk/Issue
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