It's no more a slog with robotic process automation

A training course last year helped senior payroll executive Kelly Lim transform a tedious manual task into one that can be done in seconds, thanks to technology.

The old way was a slog: Ms Lim had to log on to Wildlife Reserves Singapore's (WRS) internal system to search for an employee's birth date, use an application to encrypt the file and then e-mail the document to the person.

That all ended after she attended a four-month course in robotic process automation last October under a career conversion programme by Workforce Singapore.

"It can streamline our processes and free up time so we can look at how other processes can be improved and automated," said Ms Lim, 35.

"Robotic process automation is also quite accurate. It will not make mistakes. So it really improved our efficiency."

She joined WRS in 2019 and now oversees the payroll spectrum and approves, checks and supports compensation modules, among other duties.

WRS assistant human resource manager Chiew Bee Lian, 34, who attended the same course, applied the knowledge in the dissemination of birthday e-mail.

Instead of manually personalising and sending e-mails to employees, she used robotic process automation to automate the work.

"The robot will retrieve information before sending out the e-mail. The recipient will get a personalised e-mail," said Ms Chiew, who has been at WRS since 2017.

"It's not just about saving time but also doing more to engage our staff. Before using this automation, it was really unproductive to send a personalised e-mail."

The course fees were subsidised by the Government and WRS.

They said they had no prior background in coding and were nervous about undertaking the course but help from the trainer and use of Google search made it relatively easy to pick up the skills.

"If someone is thinking of taking up such a course, I would tell them it is fun and quite rewarding. You don't need to have a background in coding," said Ms Chiew.

The course also taught them to train a chatbot that can answer questions related to staff overtime claims and more. For example, it can provide formulas for employees to calculate their overtime compensation.

"We also learnt how to make the chatbot sound more cheerful and human-like, to entice staff to use it," Ms Lim said, adding that the chatbot will be launched for WRS use next year.

Ms Chiew noted: "We are desk-bound staff and we have administrative work to do. Some of the work is repetitive and manual, so these automative processing skills will come in handy."

Ms Lim and Ms Chiew are now part of a WRS human resource team examining various work processes to devise digital solutions to streamline them.