News - NHS Electronic Staff Record (ESR) Bot - Update Password Expiry Launched #COVID19

With increased pressure on NHS HR and Finance Teams, anything we can do with a robot during COVID to help reduce the burden and workload on corporate areas is worth doing.

As default, staff user accounts on ESR are set to expire every 90 days. On many occasions, employees will contact the HR team to have their account unlocked, and the password reset. As a temporary measure, and with approval of the Trust's security team, all accounts will be set to expire after 365 days. This will stop immediately support calls coming into the teams allowing them to focus on the priority COVID support activities. The only way to make a change is on a per-account basis via the user application front-end and so with 11,177 user profiles to change this would take a human over 558 hours to complete! So how does this work? A robot has been launched that logs into ESR, searches for the Username, updates the account expiry date and saves the record. A short process with the added challenge of automating with JavaScript. Built, tested and deployed in under 3 hours! Below is a video of the robot running (some parts of the screen is blurred for security reasons)

The robot has been configured to accept an expiry date each time the process is run so it can be easily repeated without any code changes. And with the use of Blue Prism queues, multiple bots can be applied as necessary to speed up the running time. The robot completes around seven user accounts per minute (speed determined by the responsiveness of ESR)

These processes and objects will be available via the NHS Digital Exchange for FREE!

#RPA #PAS #Blue Prism #somethingincredible #NHS #timematters