PAHO and UNICC work together to develop Mia and Max bots
On 20 June 2022, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a specialized international health agency for the Americas, won the World Procurement Award for Digital Impact for its first ‘Digital Workers’, Mia and Max bots, developed by UNICC’s Robotic Process Automation Centre of Excellence and PAHO’s Procurement and Supply Management Team.
The World Procurement Awards, hosted by Procurement Leaders, recognize the most impressive individuals, teams, solutions and organizations in procurement.
This recognition inspires us to continue to provide innovative and efficient support to Member States. It also recognizes the organization’s ability to see challenges as opportunities, and the power of collaboration to achieve great things when we listen to countries, empower our teams, and work together.
Daniel Rodriguez, Director, Procurement and Supply Management, PAHO
After putting together a viable implementation roadmap, ensuring the correct architecture was in place and programming the bots, the UNICC’s RPA team started developing the two bots in October 2020.
- Mia: A bot that assists the purchase of strategic products
- Max: A bot with optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities that creates the Advanced Shipment Notifications (ASN), which provide national authorities with information about the details of their shipments and when they are expected to arrive.
Mia and Max went live in March 2021, as procurement became the first function in PAHO to establish RPA capabilities. With the implementation of RPA, between March 2021 and May 2022, the procurement team saved 1,660 hours committed to repetitive and non-value-added activities. Max processed 22,861 shipping documents.
We at UNICC are proud to help launch Mia and Max, and do our little bit to support the life-saving work of PAHO.
Sameer Chauhan, Director, UNICC
The robots execute repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing the human team to forget about the paperwork and focus on strategic aspects of the procurement function, such as establishing the needs of the countries served by PAHO and enhancing relationships with suppliers. The implementation of Mia and Max allowed PAHO to speed up the process of providing COVID-19 health supplies, while sustaining the procurement of other vaccines, essential medicines, and strategic health supplies and equipment over the past two years. See an earlier news item about Mia and Max robots here.
Mia and Max are helping other team members with transactional tasks, so they can focus on better serving our countries. These bots are a great example of what UNICC can do to support the UN Family.
Daniel Rodriguez, Director, Procurement and Supply Management, PAHO
UNICC’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA+) Centre of Excellence has been delivering multiple automation solutions to over 20 UN Clients across various domains such as Travel, Finance, Procurement, HR, ICT, Healthcare, etc. The RPA team is ready to help. Please reach out to us at [email protected] for a demonstration.
