Automating Government Services A Use Case from Oman's Oil And Gas Sector

Are you keeping up?

In a rapidly moving life, each of us is navigating in their own way. For large organizations, countless mundane tasks are required to be performed repeatedly and consistently without slowing down. This is where digitization thrive, an ever-evolving use of technology in ubiquitous manner inside our workplaces. It does not take much effort to recall the last time a technology tool has helped us craft something or perform an existing task quicker. My document writer, is actively assisting me write this article by saving me the time it would take to jot down each letter individually.

Why automate?
Automating processes has been a cornerstone part of engineering before we even stepped into the digital world. While automating something might not necessarily always guarantee improvement, which is what optimization is. Automation allows us to use tools or technology to do tasks automatically, without needing a person to do them by hand every time. A lot of the times more precisely and consistently. One of the earliest processes to be automated is the Water Clock..

• A water clock measured time by letting water flow at a constant rate, no manual input needed after setup.
• It used basic mechanical parts like floats and gears to show the time.
• Ancient societies used it to automate timekeeping long before modern clocks.
• It’s a simple early example of a self-operating system: just set it and let it run.

https://www.history-of-physics.com/2017/08/ancient-greece-water-clock-clepsydra-of_14.html

This video (https://youtu.be/yklOe75-O2s?si=cYKPhQZyLlqrJQth) shows how ancient water clocks automated timekeeping using simple mechanics, long before modern technology. It helps make the benefits of RPA easier to understand by showing how automation has always aimed to save time and improve accuracy

Automation is Happy To Present RPA!

The entire process worked without human intervention and what is what we try to do with: Robotic Process Automation (RPA). In the beautiful intervention, we allowed ourselves to keep track of time without us being present and with even more accuracy than the blind eye at that time. Also, using less resources such as our attention in this case.

With our current capabilities a lot of resources are available to us thanks to globalization. As well as tools that serve our purpose to keep scaling automation to different aspects of our life. Recently just a few years ago, RPA has emerged to automate software processes. A lot of these processes require us to stay grounded on our computers and perform the same routine over and over. We can make our lives better by utilizing the power of software these days and scripting to customize bots that will handle our work or a piece of it while we focus on something else.

What Did Rihal Do With RPA?

Let us get specific into how this applies to the sea world in today’s day and age. There are around 50,000-60,000 commercial ships on the sea right now. A lot of companies operate multiple ships and have teams that keep track of such ships especially when they are holding very valuable products such as Oil. Most of the work comes from tracking the location of these ships when they are moving on water.

This is how it is usually done:
1. The team navigate to an Automatic Identification System (AIS) platform that keeps track of ships based on the updates provided by the ship’s captain on the website.

2. Monitor the ship in interval times until it docks (for example every 3 hours)

3. Keep logs of status.

As you might notice, each of these actions is done manually by the team member. Let us dive into what each of these steps in their core are:
1. Reporting: by checking the status of the ship each time and informing the manager or concerned parties.

2. Data entry: Logging these insights into the appropriate documentation.

3. Email Replies: The usual means of communication here is through email, where the team will send the notification to relevant stakeholders.

Here is how we can use RPA in Rihal to solve this problem, on a high level:

We streamline the process into an AS-IS (how the process is performed manually and currently). Afte that we find bottlenecks that consume time and identify what parts can be replaced with bot-equipped features that can take over (for example: sending the same email at 8:00 AM).

After following these steps, we have transformed it into a TO-BE diagram. Where the bot is confirmed to be able to perform such tasks seamlessly and without human intervention in this case.

Here is how it would look after we transformed the diagram:

Since there is no manual intervention (except initiating the request they want!) from the team after we automate this process. Here is what we saved them:
1. Data Entry: The bot will input the vessel identification number and navigate to appropriate page.

2. Reporting: The bot will navigate and grab status (and any other relevant information) on given intervals

3. Repetitive Email Replies: The bot will itself involve the team members on the status during each check as well as an entire archived report at the end of each run.

While this might seem like a sub-process for a large organization in total it has achieved the following for the team:
- Took over tasks of two full time employees

- Easily handling a volume of 50-60 tracking requests per month with an average handling time of two minutes each.

- Saved 120 minutes of work for each employee, totaling 240 minutes of work they do not have to do anymore!

When we scale a digitization technique such as RPA into these organizations. We achieve notable numbers as we save time and resources they had to allocate their employees attention towards; allowing them to focus on more attention-demanding tasks. Now, the employees will get the chance to work on processes that require their core-human intelligence, especially on an emotional aspect.