The use of technologies such as (Human resource management software), LMS solutions (Learning management systems), employee engagement & feedback tools and performance management solutions can be powerful tools in reducing employee turnover and creating a more positive work environment. Let’s take a look at how these technologies can help improve employee retention.

Using Technology to Improve Job Satisfaction
One of the main reasons why people leave their jobs is because they are unhappy or unfulfilled in some way. To combat this, businesses should consider implementing technologies that will make their employees’ lives easier.

This includes tools like automation software that can assist with tedious tasks such as data entry, or communication platforms that allow teams to stay connected even when they are working remotely. By leveraging technology, businesses can free up their employees’ time so that they can focus on more meaningful tasks that give them job satisfaction.

Walmart, a well known retail brand has been , resulting in improved efficiency and reduced costs across the board. The company uses robots to automate tasks such as inventory management, reducing the need for manual labour and reducing the risk of errors.

Similarly, DHL, a global logistics company, has been using automation technology to . The company uses robots to sort packages, reducing the need for manual labour, and increasing speed and efficiency.

In addition to this, using solutions that allow organisations to gather employee feedback and track employee engagement levels in real-time can help them get a pulse of their workforce in an ongoing manner. This information can be used to identify areas of improvement and make changes that can help to reduce employee turnover.

Technology for Professional Development
Another factor that contributes to employee turnover is the lack of professional development opportunities. Employees want to feel like they have room to grow within the organisation and reach their career goals.

Businesses should consider investing in technologies such as online learning platforms or mentorship programs that provide employees with access to training opportunities and resources for developing their skill sets.

This will help ensure that employees have the necessary skills for the current job market, which will increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover rates.

The Body Shop, which is a well-known global retail chain in the cosmetics and beauty business, has used an LMS platform to to help them serve their customers better by equipping their employees with the latest and greatest in the beauty industry.

Communication Platforms
Finally, it is important for businesses to invest in communication platforms so that all team members can stay connected regardless of where they are located or what time zone they are in.

This will allow teams to build better relationships with one another and collaborate on projects more effectively without having to worry about geographic barriers or time differences getting in the way. Having access to communication platforms also encourages open dialogue amongst team members which can lead to improved morale and motivation levels among employees, resulting in reduced turnover rates.

Several major tech companies have reported increased productivity & efficiency and improved collaboration & communication within teams and the company overall as a result of adopting the use of online communication platforms.

Employee retention is an important issue for any business; having high turnover rates can be costly and disruptive to productivity levels within an organisation.

Fortunately, businesses now have access to various types of technology that can help reduce employee turnover rates by improving job satisfaction levels, providing professional development opportunities, and encouraging open communication between team members regardless of location or time zone difference.

Investing in these technologies will help create a more positive work environment which should result in improved employee retention levels over time.

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We live in an age awash with , mental health days, and modern benefits like which all revolve around the idea that it is important to recognise employee well-being for a variety of reasons. But what does Robotics Automation have to do with employee well-being? In some ways it seems like organisations are interested in the well-being of robots more than people. And aren’t these BOTS just here to take away our jobs?

“its is about enhancing the experience and putting people where it matters, so automation is highly used”

In a nutshell RPA, when done correctly, can remove the need for some employees to engage in tasks that are largely repetitive but perhaps high value. By doing this, these employees can instead focus on other, higher value tasks that more fully use their skill set. I was very privileged recently to meet with Tammy Ryder, General Manager of People and Culture Central for Coles and discuss this topic with her.

I was interested in her view on this topic as she runs Coles HR Shared Services as well as People and Culture Digital Transformation. She was deeply involved in the rollout of , integrated with for Talent Acquisition where much of the RPA solutions implemented were used. As part of that project Tammy implemented RPA in the form of several BOTS to close some gaps and bring greater efficiency to the whole process. In discussing this topic, she said that one of her team’s key learnings was “… it is about enhancing the experience and putting people where it matters, so automation is highly used”.

Tammy mentioned that early on there was a misconception at Coles that RPA automation would take away jobs or replace people. Tammy and her team were careful to select automated tasks that were important to the business because they are related to critical processes like pay or hiring but were also highly repetitive.

These choices meant that these workers could use the time that automation frees up to instead train team members, interact with customers and other higher value tasks for example, however the BOTs were also providing a valuable service. She said “[Coles employees] want to do worthwhile work, they want to do work that makes them feel that it has real purpose and meaning behind it.”

“83% [of Australian consumers] are prepared to pay more money for products or services that enhance their feelings of well-being”

While well-being itself as a concept is a hot topic in HR circles these days, trying to quantify the business benefits of well-being can be challenging for HR professionals. Tammy mentioned that when meeting with the executive board, they were, not surprisingly, interested in facts and figures more than feelings.

So how does an HR executive get funding or support for programs like this that support well-being?

We discussed what metric could be used when proposing one of the benefits of RPA as being related to employee well-being. At present there isn’t any such industry metric and it is challenging to articulate the benefits in numbers, but she was optimistic that over time this kind of metric could be developed and socialised, especially given the strong support for well-being and well-being programs at Coles like . A recent Australian showed that “83% are prepared to pay more money for products or services that enhance their feelings of well-being”, so the desire for support of well-being programs is real.

I asked Tammy what were some of the challenges in implementing effective RPA? She said there were challenges around understanding how the technology works of course, but an unexpected challenge was the misperception and stigmatism among employees that “BOTS are going to take over the world” and people would lose their jobs.

Therefore, being clear that, in reality, the aim was to have “people where it matters” so that employees could instead focus on high value work was key for success. Tammy’s advice was to carefully examine if the proposed RPA solution had any measurable benefit, not just automation for the sake of automation. She said that in the end her team got very proficient at looking for tasks that had a clear decision tree, and minimal human centric intervention.

In conclusion, RPA can be a strong contributor to employee well-being by , allowing employees to focus on high value work and potentially reducing employee turnover, which is a useful metric to justify such a program. The key, as always, is not to assume that any given automation is a benefit just because it automates something. Additionally, leaders need to be sensitive to employee’s perception that BOTS are here to take away their jobs.

With the right discussions, and communication, RPA can be a benefit to the organisation, to employees and even to customer’s well-being. I, for one, embrace the arrival of our robot friends and look forward to less drudgery.

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Without digital technologies like ERP, Cloud, and AI, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Moderna would have taken much longer to trial, produce and critical vaccines to people. Tools and platforms behind these solutions are often hidden from the limelight. We need the right tools to operate, tinker with, connect, and compose new systems, which has created an unprecedented need for skilled IT professionals.

Passive End Users to Shape-Shifters
Around the world, there are roughly 26 million software developers today – same as the population of Australia – who use an array of programming languages, tools, and technologies. However, there are 100+ million professionals – end users – running critical business processes in banks, airlines, hospitals, retail companies, factories, and government agencies.

In the next 10 years, a vast majority is expected to join hands in building, not merely consuming digital solutions. For them to take a leap across the treacherous waters of full-stack programming, many (LCNC) are being made available. It should help trigger their primal instincts to build – to personalise, to restructure business processes, design new apps, construct workflows, and deploy machine learning models on data to make better decisions.

Such LCNC tools result in faster collaboration across teams, reduced cost of innovation, greater automation, and better user experience. This has been the – the Finland based aspiring technology leader in the premium electric motorcycles segment, where a small team created new apps in record time to manage evolving business needs.

However, while greater democratisation of software building occurs, it is not as if code has suddenly become irrelevant. Nor has it removed the need for software engineers. In fact, AI infused tools such as promise a future where tools transform into extensions of a skilled worker.

Systems for the Future
The humble axe remained the longest used tool in human history. It took millions of years in our evolutionary past before we built complex structures. Tools and skills are two sides of the same coin, and we achieved speed and scale by sharing knowledge of tools across communities, across generations.

To build digital systems of the future, we need to bring in the community. are already thinking about investing on better technology platforms. The future of work will need a that enables knowledge workers of varying skillsets to compose new business processes and re-shape their digital worlds.

With the collective intelligence, and better tools, what will we build? Bigger, better, faster, cheaper systems. Perhaps also, different, something unimaginable yet.

Steve Jobs told us in 2007 as an indicator: “In the end, we try to make tools for people, “and we’re constantly surprised with what people do with them.”

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There’s still much confusion surrounding the fundamental questions of , what is AI, what is capable of and what isn’t it capable of. Many of us were introduced to AI through pop culture depictions such as the friendly robot Rosie from The Jetsons or the rogue servant droid Sonny from I, Robot, which has set unrealistic expectations for their use.

Kim summarises AI in the simplest terms as “computational agents that act intelligently.” Performing tasks by using data, algorithms, and programs and processing a specific output or goal. Classified as ‘narrow’, the AI that exists today can only perform the task in the simple or specific domain its programmed to do so in, it can’t do anything outside of that.

As AI is merely an umbrella term for the vast array of intelligent technologies that exist, we can classify three categories of machine learning AI:
1. Analytical AI: Intelligence that we see 90% of businesses use today, AI that predict, recommend and mine data and learns from past experiences
2. Human Inspired AI: Intelligence with some extent of sentiment and reaction that must be programmed, e.g. chat bots
3. Humanised AI: Intelligence that understands human emotions and has considerable empathy to respond to the end user in a human-like or natural manner, potentially a technology that will be available very far into the future.

“We have a bit of a tendency at the moment to call everything intelligent just because it’s software.”

Passing the Turing Test
Speaking to Pete about the real world applications of AI, he made one thing clear, “you can’t call it AI unless it’s passing the Turing test in some way”. Referring to the test created by Alan Turing to determine whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human being. Using this logic as the foundation of our understanding of AI, we can apply this narrow technology to the business world of today.

“Through a machine learning angle, AI can detect patterns that you wouldn’t normally decipher through traditional statistical algorithms. An example would be, we’ve got a client that was using this technology to process applications for grants. They had a massive backlog that came up unexpectedly, and they used this machine learning to recognise what was tending to get approved and could identify and accelerate those application.

In order to keep things safe and apply their principles, they use the rule that the machine can say yes to something that is beneficial to the customer, but if the outcome is no, then it goes to a human to get double checked and processed. That’s the kind of thing that companies are doing to protect us from the AI getting it wrong and people being disadvantaged by this kind of technology.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVMG6tOkbF4

A benefit to businesses
Kim was able to concisely offer three of the major benefits that implementing can offer business and dramatically change their day to day processes.

• With multiple data touch points across a businesses value chain, there is a risk of creating data complexity. AI acts to process that information and provide analytics and insights into what the data is saying and alternatively give insights into customers and sales alike.
• Customers expect that businesses are online 24/7 to answer queries which can be combated by the use of conversational AI and remove the necessity for a human to answer every query.
• With recent supply chain disruptions, this situation has created quite a lot of inefficiencies in operations and AI can assist by streamlining some of these processes by taking over the manual tasks and automating them to enable decision making.

Pete couldn’t agree more following on with the sentiment that “a lot of benefit can be achieved just by using logic and automating simple processes with the application of basic logic. I think people get confused with the notion that automating a process means you are using AI which isn’t the case. AI comes into play for very specific areas where you need something computed that something beyond simple logic to solve or decipher.”

“If a human can’t do it, it’s gonna be very hard to get an AI to do it.”

Unlike what the movies have made us believe, the true benefit of AI for businesses is the opportunity to allow the human worker to contribute to the process with the most value and leaving the relatively repetitive and tedious work to the intelligence to automate.

The binary function of humans and technology doesn’t exist in silos, one cannot exist without the other. With a balanced approach of human led and technology led workflows, incorporating artificial intelligence into your business is far from out of reach.

To hear more from our discussion about Artificial Intelligence, its challenges, responsible use and the future use of AI in business, listen to the

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The diverse group of independents, Greens and progressive candidates elected to the new parliament bodes well for Australia’s tech industry and for its burgeoning sustainability efforts, according to one of the nation’s most senior technology executives.

Local president and managing director of German multinational enterprise giant SAP, Damien Bueno, said the new climate-focused parliament would mesh well with his company’s sustainability agenda, which included software to help businesses achieve net-zero emissions. The change also would help Australia’s technology sector more broadly.

“As far as the number of independents being elected and the Greens as well there’s clearly a mood for change,” Mr Bueno said. “And climate is very much at the heart of that. So for us that’s something we’re excited about, because both in the community we operate in Australia and as a global citizen, we’re very engaged with that topic and with creating solutions.

Read more of this article from The Australian

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When Tauranga City Council members at the helm of this fastest growing city in New Zealand decided to modernize a 20-year old ERP system, they were fully aware of the challenges they faced in meeting the evolving needs of a burgeoning community. With a population of about 155,000 people and counting, Tauranga is the fifth largest city in the country.

“Tauranga is growing quickly and we need to think differently about how and where we live, and how we manage the existing and increased housing and infrastructure requirements of our growing city,” said Scott Oehm, head of digital delivery at Tauranga City Council. “Equally important is the need to increase community engagement, getting the community more involved in the decisions that affect their daily lives.”

Modular strategy makes digital journey easier

At the heart of Tauranga’s ambitious digital journey is , which has fostered greater collaboration, transparency, data reliability, and change management across administrative operations. As the local authority responsible for the administration of property rates − otherwise known as taxes − as well as charges for water use, along with managing recreational spaces, plus other license and regulations, the Council opted for a phased-in system update, beginning with .

“Having a modular strategy to upgrade our legacy ERP systems is making the transformation much more manageable,” said Oehm. “With this initial roll-out across finance, people in each business unit and the larger community we serve are receiving the benefits of greater collaboration and transparency.”

Measurable results prove value of digitalisation

Already the impact of the new system is palpable. People on the financial team have become more strategic working alongside other business units to improve budgeting, offer valuable financial insights, and increase internal collaboration.

Oehm said that with greater visibility into more reliable data from automated processes, the council can better meet community expectations for transparency and accountability from local authorities. What’s more, the financial team has significantly sped up monthly and year-end processes and project reporting. Automation reduced manual processing tasks for financial analysts by 25 percent, and time spent on capital project reporting by 30 percent.

Going digital also brought more rigor to processes like . Now people are required to obtain up front approval for any expenditures, simplifying procurement while meeting financial standards.

“This project has been very much business-driven, allowing managers and administrators to focus on and drive the results they want to achieve,” said Oehm. “Because the system touches nearly all business groups within the organization, everyone had some input. Working together, the team has realized huge efficiency gains.”

Digital sparks cross-team collaboration for continuous learning

In an unexpected bonus, the “champions”, subject matter experts, and user groups originally created as part of the 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA finance project have morphed into de facto change management teams. Some still meet regularly, not necessarily to talk about 51ˇçÁ÷solutions, but how they can help each other create further efficiencies.

“In sharing what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, people are continuously learning from each other,” said Oehm. “These aren’t just managers. We’ve empowered administrative staff to work together to find the best outcomes for the organization. People can problem-solve themselves, and also be a source of ideas for IT to make improvements over time.”

Connected ERP platform is strong foundation for growth

Oehm saw 51ˇçÁ÷S/4HANA as the foundation supporting the city’s growth beyond the finance team to include property ratings and community relations. He said that property ratings constituted the bulk of the city’s revenues, and community relations were integral to multi-cultural relationship building.

“We now have an iterative system to track solid financials and ensure good processes without overwhelming our people,” he said. “We can move at our own pace, evolving the system as city and organisational needs grow, supporting quality of life for an influx of people community-wide.”

Explore more real-life success stories from 51ˇçÁ÷ANZ customers that are digitally transforming their business.

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Leaders from two high-performing organisations in ANZ recently shared their experiences with digitalisation during a hosted by Des Fisher, innovation principal at 51ˇçÁ÷ANZ. Here is a sampling of their far-ranging thoughts on the sustainable business realities behind innovating on cloud-based digital platforms.

Digitalisation is a mindset and tech transformation

For Australian-based Stockland, digitalisation involved transforming people’s mindsets along with systems company-wide. As one of the largest diversified real estate groups in Australia, the company owns, develops, and manages a large portfolio of retail town centres, workplace and logistics assets, residential communities, and retirement living villages. They’ve replaced over 100 disparate, legacy software systems with SAP’s integrated platform, including and , as well as embedded AI and robotics.

“We now have a single source of the truth,” said Tiernan O’Rourke, CFO at Stockland. “I’m absolutely convinced that in time we’ll look back and say that was one of the best things we did in the 70-year history of the company…our digitization journey shows that unless you’re on the journey you’re going to struggle in business, not only in Australia, but globally.”

Stockland began by defining digitalisation on the company’s own terms. The digital platform was designed to strike a balance between achieving three objectives: organisational risk, governance, and business growth.

“We first looked at what digitisation meant to us and came at it by putting the company on the core 51ˇçÁ÷platform,” said O’Rourke. “We’re a tactile industry of property, bricks, and mortar. Getting people’s minds away from physical to digital was…one of the biggest obstacles to overcome.”

Digital backbone drives innovation

Oil and gas provider OMV New Zealand recently won an 51ˇçÁ÷global Innovation Award for its groundbreaking digitalisation that included digital twins and augmented reality (AR) in onshore and offshore inspections. Replacing paper-heavy processes with digitalised and integrated workflows based on the latest mobile solutions and wearable technologies will help OMV improve decision-making, performance, and efficiencies in inspections and maintenance. Its integrated workflow management relies on 51ˇçÁ÷Plant Maintenance (51ˇçÁ÷S/4 HANA), , , and HoloLens 2.

“The use of automation and AI-driven technologies for creating intelligent digital twins is a key enabler for global scalability, and accelerates creating the digital backbone of the company during digital transformation. Enhancing this technology with an augmented reality experience including mark-up annotations, provides a solid basis for data insights, data-driven decision making, and performance optimization,” said Farid Akbari, functional lead for digital transformation at OMV New Zealand. “This innovation project will change the way we are working, and enables us to position ourselves among digital frontrunners within our industry.”

Digital platforms are core to supplier relationships

Acknowledging that no business does business alone, Tiernan said that Stockland’s deep supplier relationship management strategy is foundational to customer centricity.

“If you don’t partner with best-in-breed, like-minded companies to help deliver premium services to customers you won’t win,” he said. “We have 14 percent market share in residential business…because we evaluate every step of the customer journey, including supplier choice…you can’t know your suppliers unless you have deep relationships and are collaborating with them at a very granular level…Collaboration is an absolute threshold issue in business today.”

Close gap between DX and business realities

When asked about some of the biggest DX challenges, Akbari discussed the gap between innovation aspirations and reality. He pointed out that while everyone wants simplicity, getting there means answering difficult questions.

“We asked ourselves if we had the right organisation in place to achieve digital maturity,” he recalled. “Other questions were about managing resistance to change, and how to actively support the change management process with tools that were changing the way we work…We asked how to build and retain skills over time as innovations like blockchain, IoT, and cloud computing continue [to emerge].”

Akbari also warned organisations not to neglect core details such as infrastructure capabilities, technology integration, and resultant business process changes.

“Often the business comes up with a good idea, but we’re not ready yet,” he said. “For example, AR had to be integrated into the environment…You also have to consider operational maturity…As a global gas and oil company, we have different maturity levels of all assets, and have to map where we are for each asset, and how we will achieve that automation level. “

Sustainability is much more than climate change

While ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) demands tend to emphasize climate change, O’Rourke urged companies to consider all aspects of sustainability, including diversity.

“Everyone talks about climate change, but that’s just about the environment. To do business successfully…you’re going to have to be very balanced in the E, S, and G of ESG,” he said. “Everyone is focused on net zero carbon, and rightly so. But we can’t do that in isolation…We have to jump on [behaviour change] proactively to get suppliers to work with us in a way allows us to operate effectively. On the diversity side, business has been playing lip service for so long, and needs to get serious about focusing on this change.”

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However, there are many hurdles towards automating various aspects of a business’ operations, due to some of the limitations found in last generation tools:

• Rather than streamlining tasks requiring human supervision, additional steps are added to existing processes, creating opportunities for errors and increases in processing times. Existing automation tools often focus on tasks being completed – but as we know, business processes are made up of many tasks and interdependencies, each of which need to be addressed and orchestrated to truly automate a process.
• Automations, that rather than being ‘set and forget’, require as much (or often more) time being spent in configuration as underlying processes or data structures change during the growth or transformation of a business
• Automation development still requiring relatively deep technical expertise. This has compounded the two issues above in the past – stretched development resources becoming compromised with respect to the time spent on overhauling existing automation deployments, architecting & implementing new automations and then having to discover how processes and related tasks / interdependencies actually work.

Three key developments are now being integrated within automation technology, to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of automation initiatives.

Dubbed Hyperautomation, vast new opportunities for businesses to improve front and back end process are now being unlocked through the following developments:

• bringing intelligence to automations. By leveraging the insights from data generated through the conduct of different tasks, as well as underlying corporate data, automations can be made much for effective and efficient through automations being able to dynamically address different issues as they occur – for example, an unforeseen process change, that would otherwise need to be resolved with the assistance of a developer, can be sensed and solved by these new automation technologies. This improves the experience provided to business users, end customers and of course developers also.
• providing insights into how businesses really run. During projects to really explore different processes with customers, it’s often the case that the issue is ultimately decoupled from where people think the problem lies. Process mining allows for insights as to how the different steps within a process run with detailed metrics, providing transparency as to the “average” of a process, but also the extremes. It’s these insights that allow for the development of truly robust automations.

In conjunction with Machine Learning and Process Mining, the incorporation of Low/No-Code technology within automation tools will support this Highway to Hyperautomation across businesses. Low/No-Code technology, where people without any programming experience can develop software using simple interfaces, will allow those employees such as business process owners that know and operate business processes most closely to develop new automations as needed. This will supercharge the uptake of these technologies, assisting companies in their transformation initiatives.

51ˇçÁ÷has released exciting new solutions that address each of these hyperautomation drivers – from , available as part of the Business Technology Platform, to the innovative solution, allowing frontline workers to develop and deploy automated workflows using low-code functionality. In conjunction with our and recently acquired Process Mining technologies, the highway to hyperautomation is here!

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