With the recent COVID-19 pandemic impacting the entire world, businesses and governments are dramatically shifting the way business is conducted, and the way services are provided and delivered. Many are being forced to find innovative solutions leveraging technology to serve their customers and constituents.

The State of NJ Court System is leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in the midst of its struggles with the COVID pandemic to provide justice to their constituents. The state swiftly undertook a number of RPA-powered initiatives to shift 10,000 employees that had previously shown up to offices around the state to remote workers, rapidly built high speed secure platforms for virtual court sessions, and put solutions in place to empower the public to interact easily and efficiently with state Judiciary entities.

NJ courts

Driving factors behind automation

For many, it comes as little surprise that government agencies have disparate systems that do not easily connect and work with each other. When the pandemic hit, the need to rapidly connect disparate systems became of increasing importance driving many agencies to implement automation. For the State of NJ Court System this accelerated the automation project, creating a sense of urgency and bringing all stakeholders to the table to accomplish the mission in 3 weeks. Thus, Judiciarys response to pandemic accelerated implementation timeline to realize immediate value.

Diverse yet robust technology solutions form the bedrock of New Jersey Municipal Courts business. These systems include 30-year-old legacy systems for Municipal complaints & traffic tickets processing, 10-year-old modern web systems for online filings & payment processing, and state of the art Online Dispute Resolution systems. Expert system users and the Court staff diligently interact with people and systems to fulfil court operations thousands of times every day. With the pandemic crippling live sessions and onsite interactions, business continuity hinged on the public's ability to receive justice and resolve issues through technology with minimal court staff interference. This meant there was a dire need to connect multiple touch points across diverse systems to enhance the journey and experience of the public.

Responding to the rapid shift in operating procedures as a result of the pandemic, business and technology leaders drafted a quick time to market solution, bridging the existing online ticket payment system NJMCDirect and the legacy complaint management system (ACS). This empowered the public to pay online for various complaints in NJMCDirect, while robots were built to retrieve payment records and update corresponding complaints in ACS behind the scenes.

Examples of automation in practice

The first automation implementation, Complaints Payment for Municipal (CPM), stood out as the ideal candidate with maximum value proposition. The business process being automated empowers the public to pay online various Municipal fees associated with complaints. However, to automate this process requires that these disparate Municipal systems interface and interact with one another. The State was able to achieving this integration in just days from concept to implementation leveraging RPA solutions. Building an Application Programming Interface (API) driven interface would have meant months of analysis, development, implementation effort, and then statewide rollout challenges and staff training. The State just didnt have that kind of time to devote to a project that needed results within days.

The CPM automation is designed as a two-part process Dispatcher and Performer processes. Dispatcher is scheduled to scan the payments database every minute and identify new payments submitted through NJMCDirect. These payments will be validated and loaded into an UiPath Orchestrator queue. Performer is triggered when an entry is made in the queue. It will be executed by multiple unattended robots which will be dynamically allocated as the payment volume increases. This process will pick one payment record at a time from the queue, find the corresponding payment in ACS and update the complaint payment status appropriately. Any errors and exceptions are recorded appropriately for support staff to only process error conditions.

One of the most transaction heavy and manual process-oriented groups within Judiciary is OMAS Office of Management and Administrative Service. OMAS, through its three divisions Human Resources, Financial Services and Support Services, supports smooth and timely operation of NJ Court system. As the pandemic upended many internal business functions, it stretched thin every human talent available within the group. It was evident that automation in OMAS could save valuable human hours for NJ Judiciary.

A high value use case in OMAS Finance Unit glaringly stood out as a viable candidate for automation. OMAS Finance unit processes payments for Title IV-D service staff statewide. All 21 counties manually capture the details of payments & reimbursements for Title IV-D staff, in 2 excel files each. A total of 42 excel files are emailed every month to the OMAS Finance Unit to be validated and manually entered into NJCFS, a Non-Judiciary legacy payment processing system managed by NJ Treasury. An estimated 35 man hours is expended each month to complete this process manually.

There are checks and balances to avoid duplication & errors, and reports for audit & reconciliation. This includes recording processed transaction details into the local Access database along with unique record identifiers from NJCFS system and generating audit and error reports for human verification. This is a repetitive process demanding high precision and undivided attention due to the financial aspect, thus lending itself to potential human errors. Though the court staff are diligent, an automation solution was preferred to save valuable time and increase accuracy.

Title IV-D automation was modeled after the first CPM automation. It was created to automate the end to end process. It consists of Dispatcher and Performer, executed by robots in attended mode on demand. Dispatcher reads and validates data from all excel files, loads them in the UiPath Orchestrator queue for further processing. Performer, the second part of the two-part process, is handled by the same attended robot. Performer logs into the legacy NFCFS system, picks one queue item at a time and enters 20+ data elements by navigating through various UI screens. On successful entry, the bot reads the unique record identifier (UID) and updates Judiciarys Access system with appropriate details for audit and reconciliation purposes. This process runs in a loop through each record in the queue. If there is a system error, the bot will have the intelligence to retry or gracefully exit.

Challenges to RPA adoption

These automation efforts have saved countless man hours, reduced errors, and increased efficiency. However, there were some challenges to getting these RPA bots rolled out and adopted. One notable challenge was procurement. It took approximately 6 months, with multiple rounds of negotiation for an agreement to be finalized. Additionally, a technical challenge was automating flows within the mainframe emulator creating a couple of hurdles to overcome. Another notable roadblock was with development of mainframe automation. BlueZone, the States mainframe emulator, needed unique configuration at windows service level. Another challenge was optimizing data entry time in mainframe screens. Initial design used Type Into activity, with a normal human speed which took about two minutes to complete one record entry. This was soon re-designed to a copy paste activity at faster-than-human speed, which reduced the time to thirty seconds per record entry.

Automation is a powerful solution if used right. NJs core case management systems are on CICS/COBOL, and modern technologies supporting eFiling, Payment Processing, and other operations are complementing and coexisting with those legacy systems. Automation has the potential to act as a glue between these disparate systems. Increasing operational efficiency without reinventing the wheel, with minimal cost and quick time to market is now within reach, and addressing critical challenges in the new-normal of dealing with the pandemic.

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How New Jersey Uses Automation To Help With The COVID Pandemic - Forbes