Indian multinational conglomerate and construction company Essar Group has automated recruitment processes with Oracle solutions offering an enhanced experience for its employees.
Essar’s chief human resources officer CS Krishnakumar told iTnews Asia that they had managed to automate the entire recruitment process from hiring to retirement.
“Apart from recruiting, we could also accommodate the larger user population and processes, relating to our complete workforce,” he said.
Essar offers a unique experience for 7,000 plus employees including those from its IT consulting subsidiary firm Black Box Limited, through solutions that can seamlessly integrate with other management platforms, Krishnakumar said.
It also reduced the time it had taken for the hiring process and other internal approvals. It now allows managers to extensively manage and approve workflows and tasks through mobile applications.
Moreover, it also enables the design of dashboards and reports and schedule them for respective stakeholders.
Earlier with their legacy cloud system, Essar faced challenges in integrating various modules and software. It was also expensive to maintain, Krishnakumar said.
“It was necessary for us to adopt a modern human resources (HR) system to streamline processes, reduce maintenance costs, and enable employees to access information easily,” he added.
Though it's been a decade since Essar had moved from its legacy on-premise cloud solution to Oracle Fusion cloud, the firm has moved to Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud solution recently in 2020, replacing existing solutions targeting more stability and user-friendliness.
Oracle solutions
Essar has initially implemented the HCM “Core Module” across its companies in India, the UK, the Middle East, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.
It has also implemented solutions like Oracle Talent Management for goals and performance Management, Oracle Recruitment Cloud and Oracle Time and Labour for absence management.
Krishnakumar said Oracle HCM has offered them an outstanding user experience with a mobile-responsive design that makes navigation seamless across devices.
Employees and managers have benefited from an improved experience in the form of “alerts” and “notifications”, he added.
Through such implementations, we were able to integrate existing processes and support complex technical integrations with third parties, Krishnakumar said.
Essar could also integrate Oracle HCM fusion with its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) for easy access and management of data.
For instance, if an employee had to attend a pre-medical checkup, the specific solution integrating employee premedical into the recruitment module would initiate it from the system itself. This efficiently reduces paperwork, human intervention and time, he explained.
He appreciated the fact that each module is integrated and seamlessly works with the next module ensuring connectivity.
“We could address issues wherein a module may have internal issues or may not have a full conversation with the core HR with Oracle solutions,” he added.
Additionally, the HCM delivers automatic access for Essar to innovative technologies through updates four times per year—eliminating lengthy and expensive upgrades.
Krishnakumar suggests firms planning to cloud should look for solutions based on their identified requirements rather than looking for plug-and-play solutions.
“Create a system configured to your benefit along with a good choice of partner, who would also help you post-implementation,” he added.
Speaking about future plans, Krishnakumar said they have ideas to explore Oracle digital assistant chatbots that help to get through configured workflows.
“We are looking at having a single HCM platform to cover the entire life cycle events,” he said.