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# DLA Land and Maritime embraces Digital Business Transformation

By Jiwon HanDLA Land and Maritime Business Process Support

                COLUMBUS, Ohio  –              
Defense Logistics Agency Land and Maritime hosted a Robotic Automation Workshop June 4-6 focused on learning technologies and processes and conducting ideation for future automations that will benefit the enterprise.

DLA Land and Maritime has embraced Digital Business Transformation, commonly known as D-BX, since its launch in 2020. The strategy aims to modernize the agency’s IT infrastructure through four overarching objectives: transformational IT capabilities, advanced analytics and automation, cybersecurity and technology governance. As part of the D-BX effort, citizen developers across multiple DLA Land and Maritime directorates have been supporting several Robotic Process Automation cases.

In 2018, DLA became the first federal organization to develop unattended bots which execute tasks and interact with systems without human involvement. DLA Land and Maritime has incorporated bots into several processes since implementation.

To gain the knowledge necessary to support RPA development, associates have re-skilled themselves through certification and training in UiPath technologies offered within the Enterprise RPA platform. Once certified, these citizen developers – an industry phrase for non-technical employees who help build IT solutions – can monitor, tune and teach bots along with providing quality assurance on outputs from the bots. During the workshop, several DLA Land and Maritime personnel received certificates of achievement for completing the UiPath Academy trainings and the DLA Federated certification requirements.

DLA Land and Maritime’s RPA bots currently support the auto closing of informational Supply Discrepancy Reports and distributing Special Emergency Procurement Authority National Item Identification Number files to name a few.

However, these digital workers are not cognitive like humans.   

“Bots have an IQ of zero...they only do exactly what humans tell them to do, when and precisely how,” said Frank Wood, DLA Enterprise RPA program manager, explaining that humans remain an important part of the day-to-day management and the long-term sustainment strategy for machine learning, artificial intelligence and RPA.

Jeffrey Sherrod, DLA Land and Maritime supply systems analyst, is currently designing a Customer Support Management digital worker that will help reassign CSM cases with agility.  The automation would be available 24/7 based on the triggers required to meet business needs. Sherrod will shepherd the bot through its creation including the design phase, testing automation, tuning and surveilling the digital worker once it’s launched. From there, Sherrod and other citizen developers will remain involved with any refactoring, upgrades or enhancements required throughout the life of the bot to ensure it continues to add value to the mission.

“With the 3,000-plus Supply Assistance Requests received per month by DLA Land and Maritime Customer Operations personnel, each of these requires a manual action to assign the request to a user to be worked,” Sherrod explained. “Being able to leverage a digital worker to conduct these assignments will save a significant amount of time that can be repurposed for value-added work, allowing the customer facing personnel to enhance their Warfighter support in working the requests.”

DLA Land and Maritime has several additional automations currently operating and several others in design, build or test stages. DLA Land and Maritime personnel who are interested in learning more about RPA or have ideas to share about work that could be digitally transformed should contact Jiwon.Han@dla.mil.

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DLA Land and MaritimeD-BXRobotic Automation ProcessDigital Business transformationBusiness Process SupportRPA