Robotic Process Automation(RPA) in Human Resource Process

Human Resource Process

Human Resource processes, as we know operate on high volume data and is repetitive. Considering the number of processes in HR such as payroll management, hiring, and compensation and benefits; managing them becomes a herculean task.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) helps in significantly improving the operational excellence and making it cost-effective. It also frees the staff from mundane processing activities and helps them to focus on important tasks such as building employee relations and resolving personnel issues.

Benefits of RPA in Human Resource Process

Enables the HR department to focus on strategic, value-added tasks by freeing them from mundane activities
Saves the cost of the organization in hiring for seasonal shifts by seamlessly shifting from one project to another depending upon its demand
Reduces the scope of error by managing data from disparate systems
Ensures compliance with the labor laws by adapting quickly to the changing rules

Uses of RPA in HR Processes

Data entry

HR processes are data-driven as it manages information related to the employee’s records, bank records, and their career growth in the current organization in the system. They also have to manage data on vendors and contractors across different locations. Considering that the team deals with such humongous amount of data, it becomes difficult for them to manage it efficiently. RPA helps in automating this process by collecting all the information from disparate sources and integrating it to help the team manage the records efficiently.

New Hire & Exits

The HR team maintains a record of new hires and exits that is presented to the board at the end of financial year to provide an update on the hiring and attrition. Considering that the data was so important and so voluminous, the team started taking help of RPA to accelerate the process of gathering data and recording it correctly. RPA helped in validating the data and filling the gaps by sourcing data from available information with minimal errors. In case of employee onboarding, RPA gathers information about the employee from disparate systems, validates it, and proceeds with post-hire activities such as workspace allocation, computer device allocation, and user-id and e-mail creation. In case of an issue, the software flags it to the concerned department who take it ahead for resolution.

Travel & Expense

When the employees go on business trips, they submit their bills that go through the HR department for reimbursement. Sometimes, the team captures the information incorrectly or is unable to match the claims with the reimbursement rules, which results in a delay in reimbursing the claim. RPA reads the receipts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – a branch of science that reads the text from paper and translates the images into a form that the computer can understand, matches the claims with the receipts and validates the claims with the reimbursement rules. If it matches with the rules, the software forwards the claim for automatic payment.

Time and Attendance management

One of the major challenges of HR department is to validate the time and attendance details of the employees due to the large volume of data. RPA helps in validating the time and attendance details of the employee and flagging to the HR department in case of any issues. If the details match, the software processes it ahead of the payroll team.

Compliance and Reporting

HR department finds it difficult to adapt to the labor laws that change frequently. To keep pace with the changing laws, HR department now uses RPA for its processes as it can easily adapt to the changes with modifications in the rules, making it easy for the organization to adhere to the compliance laws. It also helps in saving the time by generating error-free reports by automatically integrating information from different sources.