Gentoo is now in its first phase of a programme to use robotic process automation (RPA) to minimise the need for human intervention in manual, repetitive and error-prone tasks, based on technology from The Robot Exchange.
Nigel Wilson, CEO, Gentoo Group, said, “The initial automation was a non-customer facing administration task. By trialling the technology on a relatively low-priority internal task, we’ve been able to take a low-risk approach while becoming comfortable with the technology. One of our constraints was to ensure the absolute security of customer data, so we had to be sure this data didn’t leave our network.”
Andy Wallace, CEO, The Robot Exchange, said, “A classic application for our technology is to create a robot that can monitor inbound email attachments, open them and identify how to process them. Any attachments that have incorrect information are forwarded to a colleague to manage. We can generally automate at least 90 per cent of the inbound manual work.”
After the success of this first project, a longer-term plan is being developed to identify further human processes that are manual or repetitive. These types of processes can be easily automated using The Robot Exchange’s technology.
Wilson said, “It’s key that the automations are used to ensure that we can deliver the best possible service to our tenants and residents. For our next RPA development, we are planning to use machine learning and neural linguistic programming (NLP) to create an early warning system that identifies our households where energy poverty or potential rent arrears could start to become an issue.”
