According to the latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development economic survey of Australia (March 2017), Australia risks falling into the ‘low growth trap’.

Automation, however, is largely seen as the problem, not the solution, and has been blamed for stagnant wages as well as past and future job losses (5 million jobs are forecast to be lost over the next decade thanks to automation). The hotel sector is no different, and high labour costs add to pressures on the bottom line. Yet, apart from a few experiments with robot butlers, the industry has been immune to serious attempts at automation, as by its very nature it is a highly personalised industry.

Productivity growth has slowed since the 1990s and, thanks to an ageing population, this trend is set to continue. Various answers have been touted by the nation’s policy-makers and leaders, including working less and boosting export performance.

However, look harder and there are numerous areas within a hotel that are ripe for automation – just using software not physical robots. The accounts department receives hundreds, if not thousands of invoices every month from suppliers, guests, employees etc. These are handled by a finance team buried deep in the bowels of the property, conducting highly rules-based, repetitive work. Much of this work can be automated using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), software that automates tasks that humans are do not essentially have to do.

Gaining further insight into the topic an interview with James Bradley, Director of Sales (ANZ) for UiPath gave some intriguing insights and future predictions.

How can RPA help hotels / hotel operating firms cut costs, and help with growth?

The hotel sector in general has been slower to adopt and leverage automation than other industries. Being a very personalised industry that relies on the ‘human touch’, quality food and plush beds, this is understandable at least to a certain extent, and early attempts to introduce physical robot butlers into hotels are unlikely to be widely adopted.
However, the hotel industry in Australia is immensely competitive, and General Managers are in a constant struggle to cut costs while maintaining very high service standards. According to figures from the government of Western Australia, average room prices have fallen dramatically from A$222 in 2012 to A$169 per night today, attributed to a surge of over 20 new hotels – an additional 1,800 rooms (a further 16 hotels, 2,800 rooms, are expected to open in the next four years) .
Hotels need to find ways to reduce operating costs without sacrificing quality if they are to survive, and this is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can play a part. RPA is essentially software that mimics human computer interaction, enabling firms to automate many of the repetitive, rules-based tasks currently carried out by contact centre and back office white-collar workers. For example, organisations will employ many workers for manual and repetitive procure to pay, invoice generation, P&L and GL generation, HR and booking processes – in some cases literally copy-pasting data – due to the fact that their current IT systems are old and inefficient.

What kind of tasks are more suited to RPA within a hotel?

Look hard enough, and you will see many behind the scenes processes within a busy hotel that are ripe for automation. A hotel finance department will typically process hundreds, if not thousands of invoices, quotations and other documentation a month. Much of this will come through different legacy IT systems, or simply e-mail, and will have to be processed in some form by a team of accountants and support staff – repetitive low value tasks that offer little differentiation in service quality or customer experience.
By automating many of these tasks, hotels can redirect staff from back office roles to front office, customer service roles – resulting in higher value and lower costs.
The same can be applied even to the F&B department. Gordon Ramsay et al may have made the role of chef seem exciting and glamorous, but most hotel chefs will tell you that the bulk of their work is taken up doing paperwork, stock counts, and administrative tasks. The limited manpower many kitchens have means that he/she will end up spending the evenings copy-pasting vast amounts of data that should really be automated.

As RPA becomes more sophisticated and cheaper, it will be able to do much of this work, freeing up staff to concentrate on what they are meant to be doing.

How would a hotel general manager, or the CEO of a larger hotel operating firm, go about implementing RPA within his/her property / firm?

For larger hotel chains, with centralised finance departments servicing multiple properties, we recommend working with one of our partner consultancies who are primarily RPA consulting firms and IT management consultants, and they are experts in what they do. We have a large number of highly skilled, quality partners who sell our software because they believe in it; they have seen the benefits that it brings to their clients.
We believe that ‘automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency’ , this means that while UiPath’s software is simple to implement, a successful RPA program starts with identifying exactly which processes to automate first. This requires deep knowledge and expertise, which our partners bring. We see RPA as a journey, not a one-off project, and this ultimately brings in many other facets of an end-user’s business including different departments, each of whom stand to benefit, directly or indirectly, from automation.
On a smaller scale, RPA is still very accessible. For a hotel General Manager, RPA may seem like a technology that is out of reach, appropriate for larger operations only, but this is not necessarily true.

Would RPA result in hotel job losses?

To some extent, automation will have a disruptive effect on a firm or industry. While the jobs of those workers who have been replaced may be lost – all of which will be in the back-of-house areas – more will be directly created but in other higher value areas, such as front office, service staff, housekeeping. This will result in better service, better business performance and hopefully, more hotels, thus more jobs.
In the finance industry where RPA has a bigger foothold, RPA implementation turns accountants from bean counters into more valuable consultants. Automation pushes accountants to attain a broader business knowledge, and provide more insights and direction for the client
It is estimated that CFOs and their teams spend 90% of their time on the financial close and 10% analysing the numbers. RPA allows this to be reversed, freeing up skilled employees to provide more value-added services . These teams are hired for their analytical skills honed through years in education. Rather than threaten their jobs, RPA will make them more valuable – this is the same for the hospitality industry as it is for finance.

So rather than recoil from automation, Australian Hotels should embrace the benefits it will bring to productivity, and human innovation.