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HR Automation - 12 Ways RPA Can Streamline Your HR and Payroll

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vijay purohit

HR Automation - 12 Ways RPA Can Streamline Your HR and Payroll

Human Resources, ironically, is replete with redundant and repetitive tasks that do not leave time for the department to focus on the organization’s people. According to a study conducted by G&A Partners, HR professionals spend about 73.2% of their time tending to tedious administrative tasks. RPA in HR can automate repetitive administrative tasks, thus improving the organization’s accuracy and enabling HR to focus on valuable strategic work.

Whether it is regularly updating employee data, maintaining timesheets, ensuring compliances, or reporting, robotic process automation can help get rid of the massive amounts of paperwork involved in daily HR activities. HR automation frees up time and resources that could be spent in making the HR more people-centric.

Let’s discuss more about the use cases of RPA in human resources, its benefits, and the best practices to implement RPA in HR.

Read More : https://marutitech.com/rpa-in-hr/

What is Robotic Process Automation in Human Resources?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is an excellent way to drive improved data management capabilities for HR. RPA is software bots that automate rule-based, highly transactional processes in the HR department that require little or no human intervention.

RPA in HR operations primarily works by having a software robot perform high-volume, repetitive operational tasks from HR employees. These include tasks such as onboarding of new hires, processing payroll, benefits enrollment, and compliance reporting that require a significant amount of manual and repetitive labor. Apart from increased accuracy and speed of data processing, RPA can be instrumental in bringing down the overall HR-related costs.

Advantages of RPA in HR and Payroll

The massive amount of data management – form filling, updating & validating records, and a continuous influx of request processing, drown the HR managers in repetitive admin tasks. The focus of RPA in HR operations is primarily on the micro-tasks, thus integrating all the processes that the big legacy systems did not or were not able to address.

RPA carries a huge potential to revolutionize the entire HR industry by bringing in better efficiency and a quicker return-on-investment. As a completely non-invasive technology, RPA can work in the background without any need for human attention. Some of the many benefits of RPA in HR and Payroll include: 

  • Accuracy and increased productivity

RPA uses pre-coded technology, minimizing the margin of errors. Further, by allowing staff to focus on more high-value tasks, the technology contributes directly to the overall strategic goals and productivity of the company.

  • Consistency

With RPA in the background, HR departments can expect tasks to be completed at a consistent level without any hassle. RPA is, in fact, created for perfect replication and error-free performance, eliminating any kind of output variations during an operational term.

  • Scalability

The cost per task or effort on RPA is considerably low when operated at scale and can be easily ramped up and down as per the requirements. This leads to minimal wastage of effort or downtime for the overall system.

  • Reliability

With no human intervention and absence of any leaves, efficiency increases manifolds since bots work 24×7, with consistent performance.

  • Flexibility

RPA solutions are extremely flexible and can follow programmed procedures irrespective of the deployment environment.

Use Cases – RPA in Human Resources

The HR department of almost every organization is usually burdened with tons of manual processes and repetitive administrative tasks. This makes HR an obvious starting point to introduce RPA into your organization.

Some of the scenarios in Human Resources that can be automated with RPA are:

1. CV Screening & Shortlisting Candidates

When it comes to basic HR functions such as hiring, a lot of time gets wasted on screening resumes and application forms received by the candidates for the open positions.

Software robots can make this process much simpler by easily gathering the applications and comparing all the information against the list of specific job requirements. Using RPA technology, these requirements can be seen as predefined rules which guide the overall selection procedure. Based on this, the qualifying candidates can be sent the interview notification calls, whereas rejection notifications could be sent to those who don’t match the selection criteria.

Further, HR managers can use RPA technology to eliminate the huge piles of paperwork involved in the process. Using the database that keeps all the potential employees’ profiles, RPA in HR can categorize and notify all candidates of their interview results. With the help of RPA, the HR departments can turn the rather complicated recruitment process into a much smoother one and help attract and retain top talent.

2. Simplifying Onboarding

HR onboarding is generally a very long and tedious process where the joining of the candidate requires coordinated efforts of multiple people as the data from several systems needs to be synced to create a new user account, access rights for applications, IT equipment, email address, and more. To be able to find agreement between the organization’s procedures and the employee’s profile and preferences, robust data integration capacities are required.

Robotic process automation can be used to streamline the entire onboarding procedure by automatically activating a particular template for the onboarding workflow of a user account. Software robots can then make rule-based decisions such as which onboarding documents to send, what credentials to assign the new employee, and much more. 

Further, bots make processes such as employee ID creation much faster and allow new hires to get started with their role in a smooth and hassle-free manner.

Put simply, integrating RPA in the onboarding process helps to:

  • Reduce onboarding process costs as robots help HR teams by handling tedious manual and repetitive processes, and automatically transcribe information from various sources into multiple systems.
  • Increase the overall onboarding processing speed by automatically validating new hire data and entering the same into different systems.
  • Reduce error rates in HR onboarding processes by accurately updating personal and account information across multiple systems to facilitate fast processing.

3. Employee Data Management

Employee data management is one of the main areas when it comes to HR-related functions. It typically requires systematic as well as consistent actions across several databases (with multiple data formats) ranging from payroll and employee benefits to company regulations, and much more.

With a constant influx of employee data in the form of existing staff, new hires, contractors, etc., managing it all manually can be a nightmarish task for HR teams.

Robotic process automation can make it easy to handle the tasks related to employee management, thus reducing the risk of incorrect data entries to a minimum. Robots can also perform data cleansing tasks at a regular interval to ensure data compatibility across multiple databases.

This also means that HR services can be delivered to employees much more efficiently and quickly. For example, RPA in HR can automatically generate the important documents that employees need, instead of an HR personnel having to transfer all the employee data from the HRIS to a document template.

4. Payroll Processing

Payroll processing is one of the most repetitive and monotonous HR tasks that organizations usually can’t do without. Involving massive amounts of data entry on a regular basis, managing payroll manually can often lead to a risk of multiple errors.

Additionally, constantly changing tax laws and rapidly evolving reporting requirements coupled with system troubles, can make payroll processing a long and tiring process for the HR departments. 

RPA in HR can simplify the process due to its ability to collect and connect the data between multiple systems such as HR and employee management, time tracking, accounts payable, and general ledger.

Additionally, RPA bots can verify the employee’s hours that have been recorded in the system and make corrections based on reports or any differences compared to the shift. Automated reports done by software robots can show if there is a high number of registered hours, overtime, missing hours, or excessive usage of timeout has occurred to further simplify the payroll processing.

5. Expense Management

HR managers in any organization generally find it difficult to keep up with the manual processes of travel and expense management due to multiple factors such as missing receipts, late expense submissions, out-of-policy-spends, and messy spreadsheets.

Although there are various sophisticated expense management solutions available today, most of the organizations still use outdated systems requiring employees to manually provide details on their expenses. There are high chances of error in such manual entry of data, including expense amount, date, or location provided by employees.

Employing an RPA solution for expense management allows the companies to automatically extract all the important fields from expense receipts, saving a lot of time. This also prevents the hassle of carrying around expense receipts as they can simply take pictures of their receipts, and all the relevant data will be extracted from receipts automatically.

6. Maintaining Compliance of the Organization

Maintaining compliance is one of the most important HR functions in any organization. Strict labor laws and other regulations require companies to prioritize error-free and smooth compliance. However, ensuring high compliance at an organizational level requires a lot of time and attention from the HR professionals where every single detail needs to be thoroughly analyzed and entered.

Using RPA software for compliance-related activities can not only speed up the process but also minimize delays and human errors in the process as everything is done by software bots, enhancing the overall accuracy of the process.

 

Read full article about RPA in HR 

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