Mike Stewart, Business Development Director – Digital Automation at Arvato CRM Solutions
The high-volume of repetitive tasks in human resource (HR) departments – from maintaining employee records to onboarding new starters – presents both businesses and public sector organisations with a significant administrative challenge.
Automating HR processes can help relieve this pressure, introducing significant new efficiencies and freeing up employees to focus on more strategic and business-critical tasks. But how does it work in practice, and how much of an impact can it really make?
Supporting human resources
Intelligent automation uses software to create an agile, virtual workforce that can mimic the human processing of structured, rule-based, repeatable administrative jobs.
This makes it ideally suited to a wide variety of HR tasks. For example, it can be used to automatically update employee records after address and name changes, promotion rounds, salary reviews or company leavers; generate responses to simple enquiries, such as reference requests; and even combine information from different departments to help HR and leadership teams quickly generate insights into their workforce in real-time, such as gender pay gap reporting.
Importantly, the technology works consistently, without error, meaning it can be relied upon to accurately handle what can be important personal or financial details.
And it can be easily scaled, enabling teams to respond to administrative bottlenecks, such as onboarding new graduate cohorts or large teams of new hires for fixed-term projects.
Delivering transformative results
By handling large volumes of work quickly and reliably, the technology generates sizeable efficiencies. It significantly reduces the cost-per-transaction of specific processes or tasks, and frees up employee time so that they can focus on more complex, emotive elements of their job that deliver greater value to their organisation.
And, by helping to keep databases fully up-to-date and in digital formats, it can make it easier for employees across an organisation to access the HR data as and when they need it – in the office, and when they’re working remotely.
A good example of how we’re helping our clients realise the benefits of intelligent automation in their HR departments is our partnership with Neath Port Talbot Council.
Working in close collaboration with the authority, we designed a project that would transform three of its HR processes using our ProcessAutomate solution – the management of Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) requests, returns for new and existing staff and completing employee information change requests.
A successful pilot reduced the cost-per-transaction for each process by 95% per cent, and cut the time taken to process employee change requests from five minutes to less than two. It also improved employee satisfaction due to the removal of mundane tasks from their day-to-day routine.
The solution is now operating in a live environment, and the Council has extended its use to an additional HR function, automatically alerting line managers when decisions on employee extensions or terminations are due and issuing new contracts as required.
Contact us to learn more about how you could benefit from our solution – CRMSE@arvato.co.uk.
