Robotic Process Automation, better known as RPA, is a software robotics that imitates/mimics the tasks of employees to deload their repetitive workloads.
“We want our employees to spend their time on more value-adding tasks rather than doing repetitive tasks that take up most of their time,” said engineer Daryl Bonbon, head of customer services for Visayan Electric. This has led to the creation of various software robots that provide solutions to that exact problem.
The company’s eBillTXT and MobileAP, for example, went through tens of thousands of customer profiles and manual system enrollment.
Software robotics
An example of RPA that Visayan Electric developed is BOSS or Builder Offline Service for SAAD.
“This robot ‘builds’ (creates) approved accounts in our customer care and billing system (CCB), (which) lessens the tasks of our service center customer service representatives,” said engineer Ninette Soten, RPA lead developer.
“This also improves our response time as previously, it would take an average of 14 hours per application before it is being uploaded or encoded to our CCB,” she added.
Another set of robots that has been developed by Visayan Electric is fad.ER (read as fader), which stands for Field Activity Dispatching Robot and farm.ER (read as farmer), which stands for field activity reports management Encoding Robot.
Fad.ER is a robot that “dispatches” (generates) field activity ready for the company’s field crews, while the farm.ER “encodes” (updates) that field activity to completed status. These specific robots significantly increased the efficiency of the company in handling consumer requests such as meter replacements, pole relocations etc.
In just two weeks, since Jan. 30 this year, more than 2,600 field activities have been created and dispatched by fad.ER and farm.ER, a number that would normally take more than two weeks to complete if done manually.
Creating robots
These three robots are just some of the robots that are currently being developed by Visayan Electric.
Creating robots, according to Soten, was not an easy task, especially for her who is not a computer scientist nor an information technology graduate; however, she is thankful that Visayan Electric and Aboitiz gave her the opportunity to learn and let her outside of her comfort zone.
Visayan Electric takes pride in making sure that employees like Soten are given opportunities to learn new skills, and the company is committed to innovating and developing new technologies in line with its mission of providing safe and reliable electric service to the people and businesses they serve.
“Although it may look like our employees are the ones benefiting from these innovations, at the end of the day, it’s still our customers that will reap its benefits as this would significantly increase our efficiency, therefore serving our customers better and faster,” Bonbon said.
Visayan Electric is the second largest electric utility in the Philippines.
It serves the cities of Cebu, Mandaue, Talisay, Naga, and four municipalities of the greater part of Metro Cebu — Liloan, Consolacion, Minglanilla and San Fernando. (KOC WITH PR)