There are several unique characteristics about Singapore that prompt the country to turn to smart technology. One of them is a labor shortage. “The major challenges faced by Singapore businesses is the shortage of labor as a result of strict foreign labor laws. In order to drive productivity despite having fewer manpow
There are several unique characteristics about Singapore that prompt the country to turn to smart technology. One of them is a labor shortage. “The major challenges faced by Singapore businesses is the shortage of labor as a result of strict foreign labor laws. In order to drive productivity despite having fewer manpower, the Singapore Government has turned to innovations to drive productivity and have lesser reliance on traditional manpower,” said John Tan, Key Account Manager at ABB.
According to him, several food and beverage establishments, for example McDonald's, KFC and Yoshinoya, have started to introduced self-ordering/payment kiosk in most of their restaurants island-wide to speed up ordering processes as well as reduce the number of manpower required to mend a traditional counter.
More recently, businesses have increasingly turned to another technology that can help with manual, laborious work – robotics. “A local Chinese restaurant known as Supreme Tastes Jiang Nan Chun has started to implement an autonomous delivery robot to assist in clearing dishes,” Tan said. “All these smart technologies allow businesses to reduce the number of manpower that is traditionally required and at the same time allow businesses to have better staff allocation and management.”
Besides restaurants and dining facilities, robotics can also be helpful in the hospitality sector. Park Avenue Rochester Hotel in Singapore, for example, has acquired two service robots delivering bottled water, linen and toiletries and, later on, food, luggage and mail to guests' rooms, according to a report on The Strait Times.
Labor shortage was the key reason cited for the acquisition of the robots, which can carry loads of up to 80 kilograms and can do the same amount of work as four full-time employees in a year, the report said. They will help take some workload off the overstretched housekeeping team, which has 22 people instead of the 40 the hotel needs, it said.
In the healthcare sector, end users have also begun using robots too for various purposes, for example the dispensing of drugs in hospitals.
“Like all businesses in Singapore, the healthcare sector in Singapore is also facing labor crunch. Smart technology can assist in taking up manual task as such as porter services and free up staff in doing more important task,” Tan said. “The Singapore Changi General Hospital utilizes a robot called HOSPI to deliver items such as medicine, medicine specimen and patients' case files within the hospital.”
Besides performing manual operations, healthcare robots can also have a human touch. According to Tan, the new Center for Healthcare Assistive and Robotics Technology (CHART) at the Singapore Changi General Hospital is putting efforts in this area. “An interactive robot that can entertain patients while they wait for their appointments and humor children during vaccinations is among the projects as well as automated bathing machine,” he said.