The Hindu Business Line : Stung by rising rupee, IT firms look to automation

Managing costs
Satyam has automated 45 pc of all HR practices

Transaction issues low priority for HR manager

Accenture mulls higher employee engagement

Archana Venkat

Chennai, July 8 After having looked at obvious derisking solutions such as hedging, offering high-end services and controlling recruitment in response to the strengthening rupee, IT, ITES and BPO companies now seem to be focusing on automating their HR solutions to increase employee productivity.

Though companies agree that revenues will be impacted, recruitment will proceed as planned.

“One cannot increase work hours, overwork employees or stall recruitment to meet revenues targets,” said Mr Deepak Dhawan, Vice-President and Global Head (HR), EXL Service.

“Automating process-oriented work such as handling reconciliation, performance appraisal and compensation will derisk a company’s cost structure.”

For instance, if rules for performance appraisal are well defined, there is no need for a Vice-President to evaluate every employee’s appraisal.

In such cases, one can hire an assistant managerial candidate instead of a relatively more expensive Vice-President level candidate for the job, Mr Dhawan told Business Line on the sidelines of the Nasscom HR Summit.

EXL Service is planning to automate HR processes like recruitment, compensation and benefits, leave and attendance tracking and performance management.

Satyam Computer Services has automated about 45 per cent of all its HR practices and is aiming at 80 per cent.

According to senior industry sources, the benchmark for optimum HR automation is that transaction-related issues and processes occupy under 20 per cent of an HR manager’s time, the rest being devoted to tackle attrition and people issues.

Mr Hari. T, Head (HR), Satyam, said the automation drive had increased employee delight levels from 3.6 to 4.3 (on a scale of 5) over the last six quarters, contradicting popular perceptions that automation will impersonalise HR practices.

Communications software provider Aricent has automated 75 per cent of its HR tasks and is moving towards the 90 per cent mark.

The company is planning skill training programmes for non-billable employees to increase their utilisation rate, said Mr Aadesh Goyal, Vice-President (HR) and General Manager of the company’s Gurgaon centre.

Having automated repetitive practices, Accenture too is now looking at higher employee engagement and offers about 16,000 online courses for employees to pursue while they are not working on a project.

These companies said that it was too premature to calculate costs savings from automation.

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