By Fawwaz Baktee
As part of the Ministry of Manpower’s Lean Enterprise Development (LED) scheme announced in August 2015, the Infocomm Development Authority, Singapore Workforce Development Agency and Marina Bay Sands organised a learning journey on 26 April 2016 to showcase how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can become more productive and manpower-lean through smart technology.
Held at Marina Bay Sands, the learning journey saw eight solution providers exhibit how smart technology can be used in the cleaning and food and beverage industries. The event was graced by Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say, Senior Minister of State for Manpower Teo Ser Luck, representatives from the Labour Movement, and management partners.
Smart Tech in Action
The key highlight of the learning journey was the introduction of the Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) for the cleaning industry.
Developed by V3 Teletech, the RaaS features an autonomous controller that can be retrofitted to existing cleaning scrubber machines. The scrubber can then be operated autonomously with the onboard camera and sensor that record images and allow for remote monitoring and analysis of cleaning tasks. This, according to V3 Teletech, leads to an increased consistency in cleaning services.
In the event of a malfunction, the worker is able to override the system and control the scrubber manually.
RaaS is currently in its piloting phase and Ramky, a unionised company under the Building Construction And Timber Industries Employees’ Union, is the first cleaning company to acquire the equipment to up its workers’ productivity.
“We encourage innovative solutions such as RaaS. We are excited to use this solution to show how this pilot project will be able to benefit cleaning companies in Singapore and spearhead the usage of technology to develop a manpower-lean growth,” said Ramky Managing Director Milton Ng.
Productive Workers
With the use of RaaS, Ramky cleaning employees like 39-year-old Dahari Mohammad is now able to train and upgrade. He has been using the RaaS system at his worksite for six months.
“I used to do everything manually, one task at a time. But with the RaaS, I can now just set the machine according to the floor size that needs to be cleaned, let the machine move on its own and I do my other duties,” said Mr Dahari.
To clean the floor space of 300sqm, which is slightly smaller than the size of a basketball court, it used to take Mr Dahari and three other colleagues to complete the task within an hour. But with the use of RaaS, Mr Dahari now needs only one other colleague to be with him to complete the task within the same amount of time.
With the smart technology training, Mr Dahari saw an increase to his pay by about 20 per cent.
Role of the Labour Movement
At the sidelines of the learning journey, NTUC Director (Progressive Wage Model) Desmond Choo touched on NTUC’s U SME’s role in helping SMEs become more manpower-lean through the LED scheme. About 600 SMEs have applied for the LED scheme since it was announced in August 2015.
Mr Choo said: “We are starting to see promising results and numbers are going up in companies applying for the LED scheme through U SME.
“For the LED scheme, the Labour Movement sees itself playing a role that changes the lives of our workers and how initiatives can impact our workers positively. We want to change the mindsets of management and see them acquire new technology and take on different grants. But ultimately, our workers must benefit from these gains.”
Source: NTUC This Week
