In line with its mission to embark into new territory, NASA is making discoveries in the use of robotics and automation within its own back office.

Pam Wolfe, chief of enterprise services at NASA’s Shared Services Center (SSC), heads up the agency’s robotic process automation (RPA) program and spoke during UiPath’s virtual conference Thursday. Wolfe revealed where the organization is leveraging automation, how it boosts ROI with a unique funding model, and the direction of NASA’s automation strategy in 2021 and beyond.

Here are the major takeaways from the session.

Where is NASA automating?

Rounding out the third year of its automation journey, NASA currently has over 70 automations in place in the SSC, according to Wolfe. The technology spans finance, human resources, procurement activities and IT, and the agency develops the automated processes internally within its SSC.

Currently, the SSC’s automation team is looking at expanding the use of RPA for the travel service the center provides: processing internal travel vouchers to ensure they meet federal travel regulations, confirming the required supporting documentation is present, and scheduling the vouchers for payment once they have been audited and approved.

The SSC has automated some of those steps and is exploring how to use automation technology to strengthen the connection between siloed accounting and travel systems “so you’re not duplicating efforts to take information and transition it from one system to another,” Wolfe said. The automated transmission of data between systems has also allowed the SSC to audit the entire enterprise of vouchers, rather than a random sampling or small subset.

Wolfe also oversees the agency’s IT help desk and has integrated a chatbot into its Microsoft Teams platform to assist employees with password resets; roughly 108,000, or 18%, of the center’s annual call volume relates to password resets, Wolfe said. The bot has reduced the volume of transactions by the help-desk agents, and does so by abiding by IT security concerns. The SSC programmed the bot to look at IP security information in order to validate the person’s identity to at least provide a temporary password, she said.

How was NASA’s robotics journey initiated?

The RPA program was born out of NASA’s Kick-Start Program, which is designed to encourage innovation thinking across the agency. The program offers an opportunity for funding certain projects outside the budget cycle and the Kick-Start program provided the RPA proof of concept funding.

The SSC now has eight internal developers working on automations, and sources its talent from graduates fresh out of college.

How does NASA fund its automation venture?

The SSC operates on a working capital fund, which means the center doesn’t receive funding from the agency or from any specific mission. Rather, it is funded from the services and transaction fees for the services it delivers. The SSC determines a rate for its services based on an estimate of how many transactions SSC will provide across the agency and their cost.

The more the SSC is able to automate, the more transactions it can complete without adding headcount. Therefore, if there’s a surplus in budget because the center has become more efficient, the SSC is able to devote that capital to other focus areas, Wolfe said.

How does NASA garner employee support of its growing automation endeavor?

NASA hosts “Lunch and Learn” sessions with employees to educate them on the opportunities automation affords them by freeing up resources to tackle more highly-skilled operations. The agency also established a process for employees to submit ideas for automation, and within a matter of months more than 500 ideas were contributed, Wolfe said.

Where does NASA’s automation journey go from here?

Like many financial institutions, there is “a huge push” for digital transformation within NASA. One area is process transformation — RPA will play a key role here — and another is looking at potential uses for machine learning along with RPA to support science and engineering teams.

“How can it benefit the missions and the technology there, and not just mission support?” Wolfe said, “and where do those lines cross? Where can you use one technology in a mission support area to potential support the mission itself?”