Robots herald a digital transformation

The Municipality of Frederiksberg is a part of the Greater Copenhagen area of eastern Denmark which is home to four million people. With 105,000 inhabitants, it is Denmark’s smallest and most densely populated municipality, covering 8.7 square kilometers. The municipality is headed by a council of 25 members from eight different political parties.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions are often known as ‘dumb robots’, but in the Municipality of Frederiksberg, they have paved the way for new digital opportunities.

Over the past two years, in close co-operation with Fujitsu, the municipality has created 25 software robots and is now able to develop and maintain these digital assistants itself.

“The great thing is that in just two years we have gone from having no digital assistants to having 25. We’ve become something of a development house with the skills to program new robots, put them into operation, and adapt them,” says Sidsel Bülow Skovborg, Head of Digitalization for the Municipality of Frederiksberg.

One software robot, known as the BBR robot, helps the municipality when a resident uses the self-service solution to register a change of address. The robot frees up the time of employees in the city, culture, and environment departments, enabling them to focus on more complex case management and contact with residents, while the robot retrieves, validates, and files the many notifications and registrations submitted by residents.

Another example is in the area of children and young people. Here, the municipality is required to show, on an ongoing basis, the number of bilingual children in the municipality’s day care centers. This was previously done manually once or twice a month, which required a considerable amount of typing. A digital assistant now takes care of this task every day without fail.

The municipality had to learn everything about automation and how to set up the right infrastructure for training and monitoring. A particular challenge was the acquisition of programming skills, so a partnership with Fujitsu was established for skills development. Fujitsu developed a single software robot as a proof of concept and a Fujitsu consultant worked on site to educate staff. Fujitsu now takes a much more behind-the-scenes backup role.

“We wanted to be able to develop as well as maintain the robots ourselves. Together with Fujitsu, we made a plan for how our internal programmers could build up the necessary expertise,” says Skovborg. “Fujitsu has a good understanding of how municipal operations work and we have been pleased with its mindset.”

The organization’s aims are to make the daily lives of its 7,000 staff and 105,000 residents easier.

“People don’t want to take a day of f to renew their passport or enroll their child in a day care center. We want to use digitalization to make it easy to be a resident of Frederiksberg at any time, day or night,” says Skovborg. “The vast majority of people now see the benefit of our digital assistants and even suggest workflows for automation themselves. We now have another 17 candidates for automation on our to-do programming list.”

The municipality is also exploring the possibility of using decisive artificial intelligence and is embarking on some pilot projects, specifically in relation to decision support. The chat robot, Kommune Kiri, has also been launched on the municipality’s website to help residents get answers to as many of their questions as possible, and direct them to the relevant subpages on the website.