Vantaa Energy – Efficiency through RPA

Robotic processes to free up Vantaa Energy employees’ time for more meaningful and productive work

Vantaa Energy is one of Finland’s largest city energy companies. The company provides both electricity and district heating and sells heat services. The waste-to-energy plant was built in 2014 and revolutionized waste processing. The plant puts unwanted waste to be used as energy. It has reduced the amount of waste sent to landfills by 374,000 tonnes in the Helsinki metropolitan area. The energy plant reduced the usage of fossil fuels by 40 percent and the company's CO2 emissions in the municipality of Vantaa by 30 percent.

The energy sector has a significant role to play in preventing climate change. Vantaa Energy wishes to play its part by investing in the discovery of carbon neutral energy solutions.

Efficiency and meaningful work through RPA

Vantaa Energy employs over 330 persons, most of which are performing tasks that could benefit from robotic process automation (RPA). “Making processes more efficient is very important to us”, states Stefan Forsström, Development and Analytics Manager at Vantaa Energy.

Vantaa Energy has 10 RPA processes currently in production. Robots are tasked with transferring information from one system to another, for example. This reduces the amount of manual work required. An “HR robot” transfers personal information from the HR system to the ERP system, thus ensuring that the information is always up-to-date in both systems. One robot logs on to the NASDAQ system through a browser, gathers various reports from there and saves them onto a shared network drive for further processing.

Robots are also tasked with updating account ledger information into the cash flow forecast. The process involves two robots. One gathers the sales ledger information and transfers them from one system to another. The second robot gathers the purchase ledger information from the ERP system and transfers them to the cash management system.

“According to our estimations, RPA saves us one FTE, that is an entire year's worth of person-hours. The employees previously responsible for these manual tasks may now focus on more meaningful and productive work. That is the point”, Forsström summarizes.

Staria was selected for its solid and wide-ranging expertise

Forsström's colleague said that he is currently working on an RPA project with Staria in another company.

“In the final stages of our selection process, we had a few supplier candidates to choose from. We decided to select Staria. They have solid expertise in both RPA solutions and UiPath technology. In addition, they are experienced in defining processes , mapping out processes, training as well as execution and maintenance”, Forsström explains.

Future plans

“The use of RPA in Vantaa Energy will increase in the future as well. Our aim is to identify a certain amount of processes annually, which could benefit the most from robotics. We are also considering investing in our own RPA expertise. The management and development of a larger RPA infrastructure will also require in-house knowledge and resources. In this regard, we also consider our partnership with Staria to be very important”, Forsström finishes.

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