Automation Journey for ADREAM FOUNDATION - CHINA

Thankyou letter and volunteer certificates from Adream
A Team of Four
Digital volunteer day
Makeshift tripod(teacup?)
Adream's Shanghai office
NGO Certification of Adream
Fieldwork in action

Inspiration

We are a team of 4 RPA practitioners from Deloitte, and we are constantly looking for opportunities to serve back our communities. What better ways to do so than by leveraging our professional expertise that we obtained from dozens of RPA projects at our daily work?

In this project, we will show you how we have successfully applied RPA technology to expand the capacities of Adream Foundation, a leading charity organization focused on children education. By automating their donation tracking process, they will have more time bringing wonderful learning experiences for children in need, and to make an impact that matters.

About ADREAM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION

Adream Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in Shanghai on August 2008, endeavoring to address inequalities in China’s education sector via a wide spectrum of projects and services, collectively known as the “Adream Center” network. The network serves underprivileged children in rural areas and urban inner-cities and seeks to cultivate their sense of self-awareness and confidence so that they can forge and embrace a future of possibilities.

Adream believes that philanthropy should empower beneficiaries with the ability to forge their own opportunities rather than just providing them with physical goods, so they adopt an unique way to help children find their passion and grow up with confidence, poise and dignity.

For more information, please read http://www.adream.org/en/about-us.

What it does

This project automates the ledger reconciliation process of Adream Foundation' public donation records. By accessing and downloading from 4 major payment platforms on a regular basis, the donation data these platforms are further processed to produce reconciliation statements, which will then be sent to their finance department for public release.

Alipay, WeChat Pay, TenPay, and Tencent Foundation - the aforementioned 4 platforms are extremely popular and most commonly used for donations in China, therefore the completed UiPath components/functions are highly reusable for other NGOs and future development.

How we built it

Our project is built on the use of UiPath as the automation tool. All key intermediate tables will be stored in designated folders and kept for a period, making traceable the calculation and reconciliation process. Adream staff will be informed timely when the automation process ends or when any exceptions occur.

Challenges we ran into

Regarding the security concerns, the automation process starts after users manually log into the payment platforms; however, different platforms have different logout time durations for users' being inactive, and the time spent on generating and downloading public donation records from 4 different platforms also varies from a few seconds to several minutes. Thus, it is challenging for us to design a proper workflow to avoid automatic logout when waiting for the data generation. Finally, we have figured out the optimal solution for an effective workflow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This project has helped the Adream Foundation save up to 80% of the time used to reconcile public donation records. In addition, the reconciliation used to be performed on a monthly basis because of limited staff and resources, while after the processes being automated, Adream foundation are now able to significantly increase the reconciliation frequency and accuracy, and better positioned to keep pushing for an open and transparent public charity.

What we learned

Through working with the Adream team on the RPA project, we have better understood about what and how an NGO works every day, and also familiarized ourselves regarding what an NGO expects from digitalization and new technology to improve efficiency, unleash resources to address more pressing issues, and elevating their credibility by establishing an operating model that exceeds the expectation from the public.

What's next for Automation Journey for ADREAM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION - CHINA

This project is only the beginning of our collaboration with Adream Foundation – China. During the time working with them, we have built up a cordial relationship with Adream particularly on digital transformation for NGOs. We share the same vision and the chemistry that bonded us together greatly facilitates our work as well. In fact, we have already begun discussing other opportunities in a variety of fields, including financial reporting and performance tracking of the Foundation.