Truly Robotics frees up humans for value-added tasks

Robotics products and solutions are increasingly making their way into MICE venues to take care of mundane and repetitive work. Truly Robotics (TR), a robotics solution provider with tech solutions ranging from IoT, AI, to facility management, has made its foray into the MICE industry. Janice Yee, the company’s CEO, shared how TR has helped to alleviate the hotel manpower crunch.

The management team of TR has more than 50 years of experience in the MICE industry, holding roles such as venue operator, and exhibition and conference organiser. Their deep understanding of the MICE industry allows them to find areas in which robotic solutions can play a part to reduce some of the key challenges facing the industry.

Top sellers

The top-selling product to hotel clients is its autonomous vacuum cleaning robot, Whiz, which helps with floor care. Said Yee: “The robot is able to effectively clean and cover large floor areas with little human intervention in an autonomous manner. This frees up the human manpower to cover other high-touch areas and work on areas that are currently not accessible to the robots.”

Whiz is selling well primarily due to the ease of usage without the need of a technical engineer. As such, this makes it easy for adoption by the housekeeping team of hotels. Currently, there are more than 20,000 Whiz being deployed worldwide and the number continues to climb at a steady rate.

The company’s service delivery robot, Keenon, is also doing well and is being adopted by restaurants and hotels in Singapore. The reliability of the robot provides a stable workforce to help supplement the current manpower shortage faced by the F&B industry.

“Many hotels operate all-day buffet dining restaurants where there is a need to constantly clear the soiled plates and cutlery from the main dining area and return them back to the stewarding area for washing. With the usage of our Keenon service delivery robots, service staff no longer have to carry the heavy load of such items. Instead, they are able to focus more attention on the guests and provide better customer service rather than doing the runner job which is now well taken care of by the robot,” said Yee.

Another invention, the hotel butler robot, with its lift integration capability, allows housekeeping and room service staff to send items to guest rooms without using a human runner. “This frees up the manpower resources to focus on other higher value work in the hotel,” said Yee.

Helping clients to understand

One of the challenges facing TR is helping clients to understand how the deployment of robots impacts operations. She cited an example: “Some clients are under the impression that when they deploy a robot, they can remove staff from their roles. In reality, it does not work as such. The robots will collaborate with the human and there are some tasks that the robot is unable to do which would still require the human to handle. It is most effective in doing roles that are repetitive and mundane, where humans may not like to take on such tasks - vacuum cleaning/scrubbing of large area of flooring.

“There is also an expectation that the price of the robot must be extremely low in order to be considered worthwhile in investing. In reality, most good-quality robots do not come cheap. The better-quality ones come with higher quality parts and components and this also means a longer service life and also reduced breakdown frequency.”

Resistance can also come from clients who think that adopting robots will cause hotels to lose the human touch if robots are deployed in operations. “However, we have many use cases that show that this is not the case as the robots are supporting the staff on the backend and the final touch point still remains with the human handling their clients,” said Yee.

Goals for the future

TR will be focusing on addressing the needs of the hospitality, tourism and MICE industry for the upcoming year given that there is a lot of interest from MICE players. The team will continue with sharing knowledge on how companies can adopt IoT and robotics technology in their field of work, where data and analytics can sharpen their focus for decision making and cost efficiencies. “With the adoption of technologies, they can also motivate, attract and retain talent through job transformation and upskilling,” said Yee.

After-sales support and value add

Besides expanding its reach to new clients through the addition of new robot platforms, and sharpening after-sales support with a dedicated robotics repair service centre, TR will aim to provide a seamless experience for customers.

Said Yee: “We foresee that there will be exponential increase in the adoption of robotics products and solutions in hotels, conventions and exhibitions centres as the benefits far outweigh the costs. With the current manpower shortage and rising costs, hotels are starting to assemble project teams to dive deep into integrated solutions where multiple technologies such as IoT and robots can be integrated onto software platforms for end-to-end solutions.

“The work of operations, facility management and cleaning all come together with a common goal of achieving manpower efficiency and a higher skilled workforce. There is also an increased focus on driving greater innovation and productivity through the usage of robotics technology in order to free up human resources to focus on higher value-added tasks.”