Case Study: University of Melbourne achieves faster emergency student aid — 4,500 hours saved and 4,000+ grants approved with Automation Anywhere

University of Melbourne uses RPA to expedite emergency financial aid to thousands of students

The University of Melbourne, a large public research university with nearly 50,000 students, launched a needs-based COVID-19 Emergency Support Fund to help students facing unexpected financial hardship. Processing and approving thousands of grant applications and issuing payments overwhelmed the Scholarships & Bursaries team, so they turned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to scale capacity and speed relief.

Using a modular RPA approach—reusing 90% of existing features and combining a few new elements after a brief scoping—bots were deployed quickly (around two days of build time) to validate banking details, allocate work, and release payments. The automation increased payments from every two weeks to three times a week, approved 4,000+ grants to date, and saved about 4,500 hours of processing time while reducing rework.

University of Melbourne

Shiv Chandra

Robotic Process Automation Manager