The next frontier in automating HR in the retail industry!
Across the world, digital transformation is widely regarded as a priority for today’s businesses, made even more essential by recent economic disruptions. For the past few years, digitalization has been altering how companies work in previously inconceivable ways. Recent shifts in the workplace have demonstrated that remote work can be successfully implemented at scale, highlighting the need for HR to embrace human-centric automation.
Traditionally, HR departments were seen as transactional, designed to carry out recruitment and administrative tasks only. However, the workforce market is changing – physical barriers to recruitment are blurred, and millions worldwide are likely to try reconverting professionally in the coming years.
In this super-globalized context, the role of HR must inherently shift towards a more value-adding strategic function that effortlessly finds, attracts, and shapes talent to contribute to the financial bottom line directly. Automating HR is a critical lever for companies looking to remain relevant and at the forefront of the business world.
The Challenge
When it comes to HR and workforce management, the retail industry faces many unique challenges coming together:
- high employee turnover
- high volumes of applicants for new jobs
- large teams
- numerous legal regulations limiting the activity
- and more
This translated into massive volumes of tedious administrative tasks that pressure teams and keep them away from more valuable tasks.
The administrative activities related to a workforce of 21,000 people were still very manual in nature. Store managers had to individually fill in and submit all employment forms and contracts, employee records, internal timesheets, and other activities specific to human resources.
The Solution
Profi faced intense pressure to maintain efficient operations and ensure employee satisfaction. To optimize its HR processes, Profi partnered with PwC Romania to design and deploy a powerful AI agent, leveraging DRUID technology and UiPath RPA bots. This intelligent AI agent transformed HR by automating a wide range of tasks, including generating employment contracts, streamlining onboarding, and managing employee data. It empowered HR staff to focus on strategic initiatives and enhanced the employee experience with seamless, personalized support.
The new AI agent automatically collects data from an identity card through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, then works with the candidate to fill in the rest of the necessary information on the employment documents. It then sends the finalized contract to the HR team to be registered and properly filed. On top of this, a new electronic file is automatically created for each new employee, which will subsequently contain all that person’s information, certificates, and records.
The AI agent further streamlines HR processes by automating the creation of certificates and documents. The new solution, designed and implemented entirely by PwC Romania, a DRUID strategic partner, streamlined store managers’ performance and simplified the employment related administrative tasks required for thousands of employees every year.
Learnings
The problems facing HR teams often come down to two key things: time and resources. Embracing technology systems and automating essential processes is key to freeing up retail human resources professionals’ time to focus on the company’s initiatives that matter.
Using agentic AI technology to automate HR processes can increase efficiency and offer a better experience for internal and external audiences, clearly impacting the bottom line. The power of the next generation of HR lies in assuming a more driven role in supporting the business objectives of any company and creating a holistic approach to supporting the workforce of the future. Agentic technology is one of the tools that will help and speed up this process.