The RPA and AI conference for the higher education sector concluded on the 9th of May 2019 with attendees from 12 Universities. This was the 3rd conference to be held and we are now seeing some very mature automation programs running in the higher education sector. There were some excellent speakers and discussions among the group. Highlights from the day included :
Sharon Post from the University of NSW presented on how the Finance Department are automating the journal posting and the vendor creation processes.
Judy Alexander from the University of Newcastle demonstrated how Robotic Process Automation is reducing the manual workload in the administration of Research grants and is freeing up her team to work directly with researchers.
Zarine from Flinders University showed how “Betty the bot” is saving over 1800 hours per year in the administration of the Chancellor’s student awards process.
The panel discussion included three industry leaders who are successfully operating Automation Centres of Excellence. Thanks to Nadine Goldsmith from the University of Melbourne, Kesley Kernes from the University of Newcastle and Matt Poole from the University of Auckland for sharing some great insights.
Carl Young from UTS finished the day off with an entertaining talk about how they are implementing chatbots to better serve their students
Looking forward to hearing from some of the Universities who are just beginning their journeys when we meet again at the next conference in November 2019