Automation technology vendors offer free tools and apps to cope with COVID-19, Part 2

Published: May 18, 2020

Many things change during a crisis, necessitating unique and rapid responses. More automation technology vendors are rising to the call by offering their rapid process automation development technologies, applications and even skills free of charge.

We previously called attention to six automation vendors (Appian, Blue Prism, Celonis, Nintex, Signavio and UiPath) that have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with free offerings. Therein we observed that, when business as usual becomes unusual, organizations of all types and sizes need to respond in new ways to serve and protect their employees, customers and partners. This often requires major changes to exiting business processes, or creating new processes all together. Under these circumstances, organization can't wait – adaptation requires speed and agility. In recent years, process management and automation platform vendors have developed agile no-code technology that can quickly design, develop and deploy automated business processes and software robots to help roll out business continuity plans, establish work-at-home procedures, track medical supply chains, and manage personal health and safety.

More vendors have responded with free access to their technology and applications, to serve organizations that need new ways to cope with COVID-19.

Automation Anywhere is offering free software robots (bots) crafted from its free robotic process automation (RPA) Community Edition offering. They include a Slack Notification Bot designed to keep employees and teammates informed with timely and relevant updates and news. To ensure business continuity, the reliance on and usage of data is much more prevalent, and an Excel Data Lookup Bot helps automate 'lookup' tasks to help cut down the amount of time spent wrangling data. To help track sales operations, customer service and support during this time, a Salesforce Report Extractor bot pulls reports and sends them to the appropriate teams and people, so they are equipped with up-to-date information to make business decisions.

Datamatics launched its COVID-19 Enterprise Support Program to help enterprises navigate business risk and mitigate productivity losses. It's offering free usage of its RPA platform TruBot until September 30. The program is open to all enterprises, including Datamatics customers, private enterprises and public organizations. As part of the program, enterprises will get TruBot modules free with 03 Bot, 02 TruBot Designer and 01 TruBot Cockpit licenses, as well as standard product support. There is no restriction on volumes that an enterprise can process using TruBot. It is a multi-skilled bot, and one can manage multiple processes sequentially across an organization.

Kryon is offering a free Full-Cycle Automation package, including Process Discovery Robots, Attended Automation Robots and Unattended Automation Robots, to companies working to overcome the business setbacks and challenges caused by COVID-19. Kryon reports that its customers are using its technology to reduce the time taken to process delayed loan requests, enable rapid online uploading of large-scale data (including COVID-19 test results) and automate the tasks required for remote employee training/onboarding.