The Client:  International Defense Contractor

The Use Case:  Vaccination Mandate Tracking and Verification

The Problem:  A companywide vaccination mandate was issued.  The process for verification was proving to be a time consuming and costly burden.

The Solution:  Automate the sourcing and presentation of multiple documents necessary for the verification process.

The Return: Processing time was decreased from 2 minutes per verification to 10-15 seconds per verification.  With over 30,000 employees this saved in excess of 20 weeks of employee time.

A Federal Catalyst for Vaccine Tracking Automation

The Department of Labor has announced a federal mandate for private employers.  The policy states that businesses with over 100 employees will need to require vaccination against the coronavirus, or enact weekly testing.  While a block has currently been placed on the mandate, this is certainly a regulation that companies will need to closely observe. In the event that the stay is lifted, it will become a challenge for businesses as they put policies and procedures in place for compliance.  HR departments will need to verify, and track, employee statuses and adopt the most efficient way to proceed so as to prevent any impact on their existing workload.

Not all companies are waiting for the government to force such regulations and have opted to get ahead of the potential rush.  Roth Automation has recently worked with an international defense contractor that took on the challenge.

Automation in Action

Roth's client implemented their own mandate about a month ago.  Initially, they were working with data sets in two document libraries, the scanned image of an issued vaccination record, and a "Not Yet Verified" internal form being stored in SharePoint.  The company was manually searching, and opening, both document sets in order to perform the necessary match and verification.  Having already automated other systems in their organization, they turned to Roth Automation to improve upon this process.

Roth Automation worked with their client to enact several layers of efficiency.  Through a series of workflows, employees can email an image of their vaccination card that is then matched and paired to a data file via personal identifiers (in this case Employee ID number).  The two pieces of information are then presented together for verification, with significantly less effort on the part of the person tasked with the data entry.  (It is important to note that, to date, most vaccination cards are hand written.  While it is possible to automate the extraction of this type of data, this was not an element of this use case.)

Even with this layer of human interface, the Roth Automation solution has proven a great return.  Where the  manual process was taking upwards of 2 minutes per employee record, through automation, this has been reduced to only 10-15 seconds.  Implementing a scalable and reliable solution has made the client confident in their compliance to both their internal regulations and those of any mandate that is released by the federal government.

Compliance and Variants

Companies had originally been given until January 4, 2022 to comply with the mandate.  There is no indication as to whether the block, and any lift, will cause an adjustment of the timeline.  OSHA and CMS have stated that there will be planned inspections of workplaces and that fines of up to $14,000 per infraction may be in place.  Quickly adopting a solution that is built for speed and accuracy will be of the utmost importance.  Vaccine Mandate Verification will need to be customized to the specific needs of each company.  Roth Automation can work  to tailor any solution to your company needs and specifications.