ADVANTAGE ROBOTICS

| in replacing manual-excel-based tasks. They can also help in bringing down the effort spent in candidate management process, assessing data of new employees and so on. These would help HR eliminate time spent on tasks that usually take up more time than they should.

Jagjit Singh, chief people officer at PwC India, says automation could drastically reduce and limit face-to-face interaction on the transaction side. To cope with these challenges, HR professionals need to reinvent themselves with greater focus on improving their business acumen, leading and managing change, nurturing leaders and building organisations that can respond to the needs of a multi generational workforce, while at the same time being adept at leading-edge technology. Corporations are also coming around to the view that all this would require new investments. Leading retailer Landmark Group, for instance, has made significant investments in HRTech and has automated the payroll process in the organisation. It is leveraging technologies including artificial intelligence and data analytics to run an automated payroll process. According to Venkataramana B, group president, HR, Landmark Group, “While the processing of dayto-day HR activities like payroll could be completely automated with bots, its use would be both beneficial and gamechanging in the analytics space where robots are connected to several data sources and can analyse large amounts of internal company data and external market data to provide empirical insights to improve recruitment, performance management, learning and development and so on.” Besides fresh investments in HR it is critical that corporations identify processes ideal for the implementation of RPA and manage expectations of stakeholders. A clear road map of implementation and expected goals should be outlined. The criticality of HR functions leaves minimal space for failure; hence implementation of automated technologies needs to account for unintended consequences. Incorrect or incomplete implementation can lead to enterprise level risks.

Banduni of GrowthEnabler emphasises the need for a phased implementation with constant validation of results. The perceived threat of RPA as ‘job-stealing robots’ is another major hindrance and should be carefully managed by organisations in addition to creating new responsibilities for the employees freed up by automating repetitive tasks.