Bots in HR processes

For years, RBI has consistently pursued an HR strategy of relieving employees as much as possible of typically administrative tasks and creating conditions that allow the team to focus on more creative activities that bring competitive advantage. One of the first steps in this process was to transfer the handling of HR and payroll processes to All for One Poland, followed by the digitalization of HR processes using BeeOffice, an employee self-service platform.

The latest achievement in further relieving employees of repetitive and time-consuming tasks is the project to delegate to bots the synchronization of selected HR and payroll data between BeeOffice and R2Płatnik systems.

The need to automate processes grew as employment increased. The systems launched in 2018 for about 180 people support more than 400 of them today. Employees are spread across several locations, most of them working in a hybrid model. In addition, the company benefits from All for One’s support in the implementation of HR and payroll processes. As a financial institution, it is also obliged to meet the high regulatory requirements of the industry. In such realities, simplification and far-reaching automation of HR processes are obvious assumptions.

The immediate impulse for the automation of data exchange between R2Płatnik and BeeOffice was a business change involving the establishment of a shift work team. It was assumed that the work schedules of this team would change frequently. It was also considered worthwhile to expand the scope of work at the same time to gain the benefit of automating more processes with a small additional effort. Eventually, after a detailed analysis, three processes were selected for automation:

• migration of work schedules for the shift work system,
• migration of working time requests – overtime,
• migration of leave quotas.

Handling of shift work schedules – a new process in the organization – was implemented in BeeOffice.

To automate the process of migrating monthly schedules, it was necessary to enter in BeeOffice a schedule name dedicated to the bot. The bot logs into BeeOffice and downloads a file with a list of employee schedules to identify shift employees by name. Then, for each employee, it downloads the work schedule for a specific month from BeeOffice using API. The next step is to process the downloaded data into a list of objects ready to be entered into the R2Płatnik system, with the calculation of night working hours.

In the next step, the working hours for each employee are entered into R2P: the bot finds the employee in the system, opens the corresponding timesheet and enters the working hours for the corresponding days, taking into account the blocking or unblocking of a given working day and night working hours. The process ends with sending information about the entered schedule with a screen shot of the timesheet attached.

Schedules are transferred once a month.

Before automation, at the beginning of each month, working time request data from BeeOffice was manually transferred to the R2Płatnik system. Each time after overtime was entered, the total working hours had to be recalculated and updated in the R2Płatnik schedule. And for each request entered, the status had to be changed in BeeOffice. Every month these steps had to be performed for 300-350 requests, which took a total of about five hours of work.

Now the process is fully automatic, without involving the HR team. The solution is based on a bot that transfers data between the two systems and is built to handle shift work schedules.

Information about what overtime requests an employee has in a given month is exported from BeeOffice to an Excel file, where the data is prepared for entry into R2Płatnik. Then the bot enters overtime into R2P. After finding the appropriate employee in the system, it opens the corresponding timesheet and enters the working hours for the corresponding days, then calculates and updates the total working hours for the days on which overtime was entered.

The process is done sequentially for each employee. All the requests of a given employee for a given month are grouped and downloaded at one time. The status of a request is changed by API.

At the end, the bot sends an email with a list of transferred data and information on the occurrence of an error, if any.

Time requests are transferred automatically every day from the 1st to the 9th of the month.

Prior to the automation of the migration of leave quotas, the first transfer of quotas for additional leave, child care and vacation leave for a specific year was done using reports generated from the R2Płatnik system. Subsequent leave quotas or modifications to existing quotas appearing in the R2Płatnik system when new employees were hired or after an employee submitted relevant requests were manually transferred to BeeOffice.

Leave quota values were read directly from R2Płatnik. For force majeure and care leave quota values, a fixed number of days was assumed. The value of the leave-on-demand quota was recalculated based on the employee’s FTE. Each quota was separately entered into BeeOffice.

The bot handles this process as follows. Reports with information on leave quotas for a given year broken down by category for each employee in the system are exported from R2Płatnik. In order to determine the quota, a report with the working hours of each employee is also exported on demand. After reading the data from the reports, the bot verifies whether a given quota was entered during previous process launches and prepares the quotas to update the status in BeeOffice (using API).

It then adds fixed quotas for leave on demand, force majeure leave and care leave to each employee. The quotas are entered into BeeOffice and it is checked whether a given quota has been loaded correctly. Finally, the updated and non-updated quotas are summarized.

Optionally, an e-mail is sent with a notification of an error, if any, or a summary of those quotas that need to be checked manually since they failed to update automatically.

In total, the process handles approximately 54 quotas per month. Leave quotas are transferred once a week.

RunBotics, a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, was used for process automation. The development environment was set up on a remote machine and using RunBotics, a cloud solution. The automation processes were built on the basis of the company’s three main processes for time requests, schedules and leave quotas, respectively. Each of these processes launches numerous sub-processes responsible for specific action steps, such as downloading, reading or entering data from and into the relevant systems. The BeeOffice REST API is used for this purpose.

Every minute of bot operation means time reclaimed for an employee. Instead of the monotonous and tedious transfer of data between systems, HR professionals can now use their potential for more creative activities that bring real value.

Bots do not make mistakes, are unobtrusive and work much faster. With payroll activities, this is an invaluable benefit.

Moreover, they don’t take vacations and don’t fall ill, so the company has gained confidence that the process will be done correctly and on schedule despite the unavailability of the employee responsible for data entry.

Automation of HR and payroll processes with the use of RPA tools is one of those activities that perfectly aligns with the trends in modern HR. Not only does it help save time and money, but it also supports increasing employee satisfaction and fosters the development of their talents

The automations implemented with the support of All for One Poland in the process of handling working time schedules, leave requests and leave quotas are further measures to optimize the work of the HR department.

At RBI, we make the assumption that every new process should be as unmanned and automated as possible. We aim to avoid increasing our workload and generating extra costs related to human effort.

At the same time, we keep a close eye on previously implemented processes. As the organization scales up, so do the costs of HR services for employees, making it more cost-effective to delegate certain tasks to bots today.

We have a whole list of improvements planned or already underway that will allow us to increase the efficiency of the HR department, including automatic entry of new requests for remote work, workation or sabbatical leave.

Our bot works fast, never makes mistakes, always gives 100% effort and performs the most thankless tasks without complaint.

Aleksandra Osikowska, HR Office Director, Raiffeisen Bank International Branch in Poland

• Migration of work schedules for the shift work system
• Migration of working time requests – overtime
• Migration of leave quotas
• Data exchange between BeeOffice and R2Płatnik
• 100% of data transferred automatically
• Acceleration of processes and guarantee of data transfer despite the unavailability of a responsible person
• Elimination of errors during transfer and calculation of working hours
• Relieving employees of repetitive work