Summer Interns Help Automate Departments
August 31, 2020
This summer, three interns from the Computer Systems Department helped develop automation projects using the Blue Prism Robotic Process Automation (RPA) system. RPA automates manual tasks, and is used to eliminate manual data entry, extract data for streamlining cumbersome manual processes, and leverage optical character recognition to create custom displays.
The students are Jake Gusew, Janelle Poukamissas, and Szu Yun (Adam) Chin. They worked with Dr. Jill O’Sullivan, Chair, Computer Systems Department; Russell Esposito, Assistant Professor, Computer Systems Department; and consulting partner IgniteIPA.
“Internships provide invaluable benefits for students,” says Professor Esposito. “They become familiar with a professional work environment, gain industry knowledge, develop technical and people skills, gain interview confidence, as well as a more robust resume. Employers benefit by having interns absorb project work, and many of our students are ultimately hired to fill position vacancies.”
The students were especially helpful to the Information Technology Department, and will stay on for the fall semester.
“They will continue to work with us as student assistants, as we continue to build out our RPA Center of Excellence within IT,” says Peter Grizzaffi, Chief Information Officer. “This will keep their newly acquired skills current, and give them additional experience they can leverage when they graduate.”
The students are Computer Programming & Information Systems majors, who expect to graduate in 2022. Their projects are as follows.
Jake Gusew – The Excelsior Scholarship transfer credit verification process is completed hundreds of times each semester by Student Financial Services. Credit verification requires verifying each transfer student’s credits from their Degreeworks audit. It’s done by looking at the student’s transcript in the Banner system, and recording the term the course was completed, where it was completed, and credits earned. The process is difficult to automate from an RPA perspective, since many of the transcripts are inconsistent in layout, and are in the format of scanned PDFs. The solution was to use Optical Character Recognition software to determine the layout and content of each transcript. When the solution is run, it produces a document that shows exactly what is needed to verify the student’s credits, instead of having to pick through the transcript manually.
Janelle Poukamissas – Every semester Human Resources has to input appointment information for returning and new-hire adjunct professors. This is done by gathering the appointment information from Interview Exchange, and inputting the data into SUNY HR. All the information has to be manually entered into the system, which can take weeks to complete. The solution was to use RPA technology to program a robot to complete the process. The robot logs on to Interview Exchange, exports an Excel sheet that holds appointment information, and saves the PDF of the appointment forms. Then it logs on to SUNY HR, and inputs the data into the system.
Szu Yun (Adam) Chin -Each time a student is hired or re-hired at FSC, the work needed to get the student into the system is a highly manual process that goes across multiple systems. Student information has to be on-boarded to the SUNYHR system in order for them to be selected for awards or paid. As a result, few students are able to meet with a work-study coordinator in a timely manner, which results in problems ranging from budget issues to a slow hiring process. The solution is to automate the on-boarding process to be able to increase efficiency and reduce average wait times at Student Financial Services. As a result, the process notifies departments of new students and budgets in a report. The project team had the system extract details from the forms needed, and update the information in SUNYHR and Banner. They then generated a report for departments for each payroll period.
Szu Yun (Adam) Chin
Jake Gusew
Janelle Poukamissas
