HR workflow in a major company involves a stream of tens of thousands of files of varying content and complexity. Recruitment, hiring, moving and dismissing employees, annual vacations, familiarization with government decrees, processing business trips, approving applications, evaluating and training personnel - all these actions have their own rules and involve new documents being generated.
Based on an assessment of Softline's customers, large organizations spend 190,000-290,000 rubles per 100 persons every year signing original documents. This is a significant amount of money, which doesn't do anything to solve the problems of a paper-based workflow: lengthy approvals, errors in producing documents (resulting in fines), expanding space in premises used to store paper archives, costs of printing and transporting documents.
But everything can be changed for the better! Polina Duykova, Head of EDS/ECM at Softline, talks about the large-scale impact that automation can have on the process of hiring new employees.
About the customer
Our client is a Russian retail chain doing business throughout Russia. It is a large organization that is distributed widely geographically with dozens of stores. The key business customer was the HR manager himself.
The challenge
In global terms, the business needed to speed up the process of hiring new staff as quickly as possible with the minimum number of HR personnel. It was especially important to resolve this issue with summer just round the corner, when mass hiring for seasonal work begins. It is important to provide a large influx of new co-workers with appropriate documentation support.
The customer was focused not only on automating routine operations and data systematization, but also on setting up the employee register in an automated mode, on the instant synchronization of new information, and on its rapid launch into the company's ecosystem. It was assumed that all of this should be implemented without or with minimal involvement from the HR team.
The solution
Softline implemented the project in several stages. Firstly, the architecture of the business application was developed. While it was being created, Softline experts collected and analyzed all the systems that were to be combined into a single network. This resulted in integration with the financial accounting system, the payroll system, as well as the applications of the HR outsourcing partner.
The main innovation was the creation of personal accounts for applicants.
Applicants can now submit job applications directly in stores using tablets on special counters. At the same time, the personal data of potential employees are protected using encryption technologies. If an applicant's application form is approved, a package of 20 documents is automatically generated for him/her based on templates. The information is sent to the HR department to be collated. The next step is the automatic distribution of the prepared documents for printing to the store where the new employee will work. This includes not only an employment contract, a paper copy of which must be given to the employee, but also various official forms.
As part of the test run, which lasted 3 months, 1,000 applications from applicants were processed and 500 people were hired. A total of 12,000 documents were generated without any involvement from the HR personnel. The system has now been approved and is fully operational.
The results
The HR department in the customer's company only has a team of seven people dealing with the organization's total workforce amounting to several tens of thousands of employees. A huge volume of routine operations has been transferred to the electronic document management system and is being implemented automatically.
Implementation of this solution has produced real efficiencies: the time for preparing documents for hiring new employees has been reduced; the processes involved in sending documents for signing to regional stores and returning completed documents have been simplified and optimized; and shipping costs have been minimized. The time spent inputting scan copies has significantly decreased.
Several key IT systems for HR processes have now been linked together.
Thanks to automation, HR procedures have begun to be carried out dozens of times faster, errors have been eliminated when producing documents based on a template, and the approval of applications has become easier. HR managers have noticed an overall increase in transparency and accountability. By digitalizing the hiring process, the time for hiring new employees has been reduced by 60%, while the total labor costs of the HR department have been cut by 45%. The proportion of correct data received in the HR department is now a record 97%.
