Front-Office Management of Service Operations with Robotic Process Automation

Coordinating service capacity with dynamic varying, market-driven customer demand in a service business imposes correlating and synchronizing front-office and back-office processes - the first addressing customer relationship management and the second inventory planning, forecasting demand, analytics, and strategic decision making. Front office management (FOM) contributes substantially in coordinating the services requested by guests, and needs to be integrated in an Operations Management Software system specific for hotel business. Research efforts are currently directed towards automating repetitive, time consuming operations included in front office processes that are in great number, initiated by random events and customer actions with variable timing. The paper presents a solution to automate FOM operations that are kept consistent with the business strategy of the organization, and assist front-office workflows involving customers (service requests, service quality assessment) and front line personnel (registration, check in, check out, taxation and invoicing). The solution is based on the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology extended with AI-based functionalities for the intelligent process automation and integration with back-office workflows.