Trelleborg - Automated social welfare decisions

In the municipality of Trelleborg, AI technologies are used to automate various social assistance decisions since 2016. It was the first municipality to use Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to handle various applications on social assistance. At the moment, the automated decision making system is able to process applications for homecare, sickness benefits, unemployment benefits and taxes and has been regarded as a successful example for others to follow. Various other Swedish municipalities are exploring how to implement the Trelleborg model to gain access to the same kinds of benefits. Previously, employees had to manually assess the applications which took considerable amounts of time and costs. With more than 300 applications on social benefits in the municipality every month, citizens sometimes had to wait an average of 8 days on the decision on their welfare-payments, which sometimes leading up to 20 days. As a result of this waiting time, citizens would frequently contact the department about their applications, further increasing the workload of the staff. The decision to use AI to improve the welfare payment process was thought limit the waiting time and consequently various worries of payment delivery by citizens. Any rejected applications are still handled by people themselves. The automation of the welfare services was not possible if there was not already an online process for people to submit their welfare applications to. In 2015, Trelleborg was the first Swedish municipality to digitalize their administration on social benefits. Already 75% of the citizens used the online platform to access welfare payments which enabled significant data and information to automate this process with RPA technology. Without the data coming from the self-service portal, it would not have been possible to automate these processes. Valcon, a consultancy, helped to develop and implement the RPA platform. As a result of the automation process, the waiting time for citizens on their welfare applications has been significantly reduced. It has been mentioned that many case handling times for people in economically vulnerable situations has been reduced from 10 days to 1 day, with all financial assistance decisions done within 24 hours. In addition, two employees in the Trelleborg administration could be allocated to spend more time on other, value adding tasks such as handling more complex cases.