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_{Robot assistance extends useful life of Port of Tauranga systems}

Saving money and giving additional upgrade time – while easing burden on staff.

_{About Port of Tauranga}

Port of Tauranga is New Zealand’s largest and most efficient port, connecting New Zealand and the world.

Its Tauranga Container Terminal at Sulphur Point handles around 41 percent of all shipping containers for New Zealand. The Port provides an international container freight hub, bulk cargo wharves, bunkering facilities and extensive cargo storage. It’s also the only terminal able to accommodate the largest container ships to the country and is connected by road and rail to a network of freight hubs and logistics services.

_Background

Like any business that’s been in operation for a while – the Port company was officially established in1988 – Port of Tauranga is home to plenty of legacy technology systems.

For Thomas Wansbone, Port of Tauranga Financial Controller, they are a blessing – and, sometimes, a headache.

“We have an IT person who has built many billing systems over the years, which is handy – whenever we have a new revenue stream, we build the system and can go ahead. That’s been really cool,” he notes.

But while the legacy billing systems do ‘a really good job’, they aren’t automatic, they’re not really scalable and they’re a little slow, Wansbone says.

Each vessel in port must be charged certain costs, and each container on the vessel must be charged for customer-required movement, rail cost, security and power.

Data from the container terminal system has to be reconciled and imported into the proprietary Microsoft Access databases, from which supporting documents are created.

“There was a lot of data to import, go through and do the reconciliations. It took a while to go in and create the supporting documents, but none of it was really using your brain.”

And that, Wansbone says, made it the perfect opportunity for a robot – helping future proof processes and ensuring the port could handle future growth without constantly having to increase team numbers.

“At that stage we wanted to keep the underlying system and process the same. The robot would enable us to do that.”

Port of Tauranga engaged Quanton, New Zealand’s leading practitioner of automation, and leaders in providing digital transformation services, in 2018, and Visbot – Vessel Invoicing System Bot – was born.

It was an immediate success. Handled manually, each vessel took up to one to two hours to process. Robot test runs saw each vessel processed in five to seven minutes.

“Visbot meant we didn’t have to increase headcount as volume grows and more vessels come in. Having the robot going in the background has kept a lid on the headcount and means that the team can put their minds to better use than just that mundane task.”

_{Getting C-Sharp}

The success of Visbot prompted Port of Tauranga to explore other options. Its next target? Chasing potential debtors. 

Wansbone admits it wasn’t a big issue for the Port, which rarely had bad debts, but when Covid hit there were concerns that credit would be tough and some people might not be able to pay bills.  

“We didn’t have an automatic reminder system in place,” he says. 

“All customers who fell overdue were followed up, but it took a lot of time and was a manual process,” he says. “We needed a good robust system in terms of chasing debts regularly.”

Chasebot, developed with Quanton, looks at a table with all outstanding debtors and, based on how many days payment is overdue, sends reminder emails, more formal letters or a warning that a credit stop would be applied.

Chasebot doesn’t use traditional RPA. Instead, it’s written in C-sharp, minimising licensing.

“Our technology-agnostic approach means we can come up with the best fit solution for clients,” says Garry Green, Quanton Managing Director.

“We weren’t trying to force one technology over every problem. Instead, it’s a case of ‘what’s the problem’ and then finding something that can solve that specific problem in the best possible way.”

_{Steering for an automated future in the words of the customer}

“We want to automate things as much as possible,” Wansbone says of the future.  

It’s not just in IT – there’s a new project underway to automate parts of the container terminal with automated stacking cranes.  

On the IT front, Wansbone says there is plenty of scope for automation at the container terminal. That’s the next likely project in fact, with work to scope a potential project already underway.

“We will look to automate some processes at the container terminal. There’s a whole lot of data moving all over the show where we could put in a robot.

“The terminal space will definitely be the future.”

_{The terminal team have seen the work done with Visbot and Chasebot.}

“It’s just trying to get that penetration and hopefully once we get the first bot implemented we will uncover other areas where it would be great to use robots,” he says.

“Chasebot was Covid related, but the other robots were just because of the systems we have and the way we do things. We thought they were perfect things for robots to do and it has been handy to take the pressure off the team,” he says.

“There is always an element of manual work being done, particularly on the admin and billing side of things, so there are certainly areas where we can use robotics to help us out.

“And while what we’re using our robots for is not something that is grand scale, it is a small thing that we have been able to use to help us save time for our small team.”

_{Charting new life for older systems}

“The robots have enabled us to continue using our legacy software and our same processes and just put the robot over the top of it so we don’t need humans to do it,” Wansbone says.

It is, he notes, a relatively easy way for the business to get extra mileage out of older proprietary systems.

“We can extend the useful life of those proprietary systems. Eventually, as we are doing, we will need to update those systems, but instead of having to do it five or 10 years ago, it has given us this extra life which has been fantastic, saved us a lot of money and given us more time to work through things.”