The Romanian Red Cross (RRC), part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, is a volunteer-led, humanitarian organization providing emergency assistance, disaster relief, and education inside Romania.
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, over 7.8 million refugees have relocated to countries in Europe, making it the second-largest crisis since World War II. The RRC is on the front line of helping people who arrive from Ukraine and engaged the help of UiPath to better manage the donations process for the refugees.
Reporting headaches
The rapid influx of people into Romania heightened the reporting needs of the RRC, which was designed to sustain an annual, centralized cycle.
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As a result, the RRC’s Bucharest headquarters struggled to obtain reliable data in time from its 47 regional centers collecting donations. This challenge hampered the organization’s ability to complete vital tasks, such as reporting regular donation overviews to the Romanian Department for Emergency Situations (DSU), a government agency coordinating the emergency response.
Using the UiPath Business Automation Platform, the RRC hoped to become more agile and efficient with real-time access to vital data, including information on how donations are used.
A team of UiPath citizen developers supported the RRC to map, streamline, and ready the reporting process for automation.
The first software robot’s task was generating regular reporting templates for each regional center, ensuring they corresponded with global reporting needs. A second software robot then centralized the data from each center into one master report.
Empowering the RCC to serve refugee needs
The use of software robots has allowed RRC to dedicate attention to supporting the needs of the refugees.
Time spent on reporting fell from 8-12 hours to 30 minutes. Fast access to real-time data enhanced decision-making and fostered collaboration with international agents. Furthermore, data accuracy and reliability increased, reducing human error and providing RRC staff with a streamlined and standardized template for reporting.
Finally, the automated process is now a framework for the RRC to quantify the time spent by volunteers on tasks, enabling better measurement and visibility of volunteers’ time.
“As the humanitarian crisis deepened, the RRC joined in the first line of response in supporting Ukrainian refugees in Romania,” said RRC director Silviu Lefter. “We needed to provide insight to the Romanian authorities on the donations and help we were providing to Ukrainian refugees. We were faced with a lot of manual reporting, which impacted data accuracy and availability. The UiPath Business Automation Platform allowed us to focus on what matters most: providing vital support for millions of refugees.”
“The unjust war in Ukraine impacted millions of lives and plunged us all into an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. We strongly believe in the power of automation to support organizations facing crises, helping to relieve their staff and empowering them to carry out their mission,” said Daniel Dines, UiPath co-founder and co-CEO.
