SAP Services has automated the creation of job offers across different countries so that relevant documents and employment contracts are always in line with local legislation.
HR specialists can thus focus on more skilled work, such as personal consultations with job applicants.
SAP Services provides business services to SAP subsidiaries around the world. As the company grows, it is hiring more and more new people. This represents a considerable administrative burden in the form of creating job offers and contracts.
Just to illustrate: in 2016, the SAP Services HR team created more than 23,000 job offers for candidates from 32 countries. In order to make this activity more effective, the company decided to introduce a robotic automation solution.
Robots prepare job offers in 5 to 10 minutes
The pilot project was implemented on one of the main HR processes with a high share of manual work – creation of job offers. Different types of employment, separate legal entities, full-time/part-time employment, local legislation in different countries and a number of other factors have to be taken into account.
"In addition to the employment contract, an offer itself includes various attachments, personal data forms and tax documents. Typically, this is 5-10, in extreme cases up to 20 documents, including language mutations according to local legislation," explains Vojtech Svagr, who leads a project team in SAP Services.
The aim of the project, launched at the end of 2015, was to automate the way "human" specialists create job offers and to teach software robots to use all local work processes, job offer templates, attachments and tax forms.
First of all, it was necessary to standardise and simplify all the documents used. Six months later, testing and debugging took place.
In May 2016, the system started to be used in four countries and a team of 50 people began generating job contracts with the help of robots. The robots carry out non-stop processing of input files with employee data and within 5-10 minutes create a job offer without any impact on the protection of personal data.
Automation has removed human errors
Relevant processes have been accelerated, mistakes reduced and substitution of workers at times of demand or holidays is more effective.
"The total added value is in the scores to hundreds of saved hours of human work which previously led to repetitive manual tasks," adds Vojtech Svagr.
"Efficiency has increased in various ways. Previously, we used second-party controls in accordance with auditing rules, which considerably prolonged the whole process. With automation, we can also avoid human error because the robot works exactly according to given rules. People have retained such activities as work with exceptions, personal communication with candidates and other departments."
SAP wants to deploy its robotic automation of job offers creation gradually in other countries, and plans to create up to 60% of job offers this way this year.
At the same time, a part of the project team is being trained to adapt the software to the conditions of other countries or other processes.
In the future, it will be possible basically to automate any manual process without the need to involve IT specialists.
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