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as third-party application pro- gramming interface integra- tions that merchants use to support drone registration.
Also, O’Donoghue said, the system was built with security in mind. “We used our agile and DevOps practices to inte- grate security scanning pro- cesses to quickly identify and remediate vulnerabilities,” he said. “We used cloud-native capabilities to rapidly estab- lish account management ca- pabilities, secure credit card processing capabilities, secure API management capabilities and protect the site against denial-of-service attacks.”
The system was designed to handle 200,000 concurrent users and 800,000 registra- tions an hour. Within two months of the site’s launch, more than 330,000 registra- tions had been processed, with an average time to regis- ter of less than three minutes.
— Karen Epper Hoffman
Targeting data pain points with process robotics
Several federal agencies are testing a program to reduce the manual labor associated with repetitive, rules-based data tasks
Data entry is the bedrock of computer-enabled analysis — and it’s boring, time-con- suming and prone to errors.
That’s where process robotics comes in. Rules- based software automates mundane, repetitive com- puter tasks so employees can focus on mission-critical work. Currently being test- ed at five federal agencies spanning defense, health and homeland security,
AUTOMATED RADIO TESTING SPEEDS
PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE
The Los Angeles Information Technology Agency’s robotic system automates the time-consuming testing of handheld radios
Maintaining the radios that city and public safety workers rely on is critical, but pulling radios out of service is so disruptive that preventive testing doesn’t happen as regularly as it should. Officials at the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency are hoping to change that.
“Waiting for your brakes to fail before you brought your car in — that’s the kind of situation that we have with 11,000 police radios, 5,000 fire radios, and we’re not even talking about the radios in the vehicles,” Peter Benjamins, senior communications electrician supervisor at ITA, told GCN.
He called it a “logistics nightmare” to take radios from the people who need them to do their jobs long enough to test and repair the devices.
To speed the process, ITA automated the procedure for testing and repairing handheld radios. The solution uses a robotic arm with machine vision to place radios into a test cradle, where a communications monitor runs hundreds of tests. Now testing can happen during off-hours to find the 3 percent to 5 percent of radios that need repairs.
Testing will become more complicated as radios become more reliant on software, Benjamins said. It can taken 200 or even 300 steps with newer models. “That’s what’s driving us to automate it,” he added.
ITA officials hope to reduce the $25,000 setup cost so they can make the system available to local police and fire stations. When that happens, Benjamins said preventive maintenance and regular checkups will become routine, and officers won’t wait until a radio breaks before they bring it in for testing.
process robotics has already proven its ability to save significant time and money while improving accuracy.
At one federal health or- ganization, a pilot project is reducing the labor associated with capturing, archiving, confirming and reporting
the data required to monitor the performance of far-flung research labs. The system not only enters the data, but also analyzes, compares and vali- dates it — even going as far as identifying and reporting data outliers and variances to the test sites.
“Before, in a laboratory, you would have scientists doing routine work,” said Marc Mancher, a principal at Deloitte Consulting and leader of the process robot-
ics effort. “The scientist would take the data from the Excel spreadsheet and move it into a new database and run some basic analyt- ics to see if there is any cor- relation. Say that takes 10 minutes per item and they do 100 of these a day; that is 1,000 minutes they spend doing this. We have taken 1,000 minutes of work and turned it into two minutes through the machine.”
A recent commercial implementation resulted in
a 92 percent labor savings and a 71 percent increase in efficiency — improvements Mancher said could help fed- eral agencies when money for staff and contractors is scarce.
Process robotics operates
— Matt Leonard
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