Coro­n­avirus appli­ca­tion pro­cess­ing robot

The Busi­ness Oulu busi­ness ser­vices unit com­mis­sioned a soft­ware robot to speed up the pro­cess­ing of coro­n­avirus ben­e­fit appli­ca­tions for pri­vate entre­pre­neurs. The robot auto­mat­i­cal­ly dis­trib­utes the appli­ca­tions between the case offi­cers, speed­ing up the process work­flow.

Depend­ing on the day, the city reg­istry received from sev­er­al to dozens of appli­ca­tions for the ben­e­fit, all of which the robot process dis­trib­uted to case offi­cers in a mat­ter of a few min­utes with­out errors. “The sav­ings in work­ing hours we were able to achieve while retain­ing reli­a­bil­i­ty are sig­nif­i­cant, and allow us to focus our resources on the actu­al assess­ment of the appli­ca­tions, nec­es­sar­i­ly a human process. For the entre­pre­neurs in need of assis­tance, it’s impor­tant we process their appli­ca­tions as quick­ly as pos­si­ble”, says Busi­ness Oulu Ser­vice Man­ag­er Mari Rauti­ainen. The robot was designed and deployed on an accel­er­at­ed sched­ule. “A month ago we were had our first design meet­ing, and already the robot is hard at work. It’s great we at the city can car­ry out agile projects like this when we need to.”

The project was car­ried out in con­junc­tion with Oulun Digi and Q‑Factory. Oulun Digi was respon­si­ble for project coor­di­na­tion and the tech­ni­cal envi­ron­ment, Q‑Factory for devel­op­ing the robot itself. “It takes good team­work to car­ry a project through. We had an easy time of it with the able per­son­nel at Q‑Factory. They were capa­ble of quick­ly react­ing to a vari­ety of needs”, says Rauti­ainen.

Self-employed entre­pre­neurs with­out employ­ees whose eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances and rev­enues have sig­nif­i­cant­ly declined due to the coro­n­avirus epi­dem­ic start­ing from the 16th of March, 2020 were eli­gi­ble for a 2000 € ben­e­fit from their munic­i­pal­i­ty of domi­cile to sup­port them through the coro­n­avirus-induced dis­rup­tion in busi­ness. For Oulu, the ben­e­fit appli­ca­tions were processed by Busi­ness Oulu busi­ness ser­vices. The appli­ca­tions were open until 30 Sep­tem­ber 2020.

By the 4th of June, 2020, 1,185 appli­ca­tions had been received. Of these 1,175 were dis­trib­uted for pro­cess­ing and 1,090 deci­sions made.