Organizations of all sizes continue to pursue digital HR transformation to achieve an optimized HR delivery model – one that enables their leaders to focus their efforts on strategic activities associated with attracting, developing, and retaining top talent for the business rather than spending valuable time on repetitive administrative tasks. To a large extent, this is being acheived through advances in self-service, mobile HR apps, and a fundamental shift in workers taking more ownership in managing their data and careers. 

However, despite the significant strides brought about by today’s HR technology, there is still a great deal of opportunity for process optimization within HR, payroll, and finance delivery models, where teams working in these areas have traditionally operated in a manual, labour-intensive, and inefficient process environment.  

Advancements in RPA and AI are having a major impact on the efficiency of HR organizations, and the progression of automation in HR is being driven by outsourcing firms who seek to offer clients “next generation” HR technology, solutions, and digital transformation enablers.  

RPA as a Service

NelsonHall’s research finds that while demand for intelligent technology capabilities is steadily increasing across organizations of all sizes, many are still uninformed of the possibilities and capabilities of RPA and AI and their potential impact on HR. Further, unless an organization is fairly large, with deep sets of data, pools of FTEs, and with the capability and funding to support internal RPA programs, deriving a business case for investing in automation for unique HR use cases is unlikely to happen.

However, last month at the Workday Rising event in Las Vegas, OneSource Virtual (OSV) introduced Robotic Process as a Service (RPaaS), which aims to solve this issue by delivering a turnkey RPA solution. The offering eliminates the need for buyers to make large investments in developing automation capability or sustaining deep data sets to support AI progression. This makes RPA more affordable and accessible to the middle market buyer.

With RPaaS, OSV will develop robots to support a library of processes that address common, high-volume tasks for HR and finance. OSV clients (all of which operate on the Workday system) can license the bots through a SaaS model directly from OSV, immediately benefiting from the automation capability integrated within Workday, as well as OSV’s patented service-enabling technology, Atmosphere.

The bot library, which OSV is building and leveraging internally, begins with use cases derived from OSV’s experience delivering payroll and tax services for its clients. Items such as data validation, invalid address formatting, invalid SSNs, negative wages, or invalid characters present in HR data are all targets for RPA robots in the early days. Further, at Workday Rising, OSV conducted the first of a series of brainstorm sessions through RPaaS.com, where its clients can weigh in and vote on future use cases and shape OSV’s bot development – a process which mirrors that of Workday’s engagement with its customer community for future platform enhancements.

The roadmap & outlook for RPaaS

By January 2019, OSV plans to have ten use cases in its library when the offering becomes generally available to its client base for subscription. Looking further ahead, in addition to ongoing development of its bot library and use cases, OSV will seek to engage its existing client base with the solution, with plans to expand this to non-clients as a standalone offering in the next 18 months. While the solution is currently purpose-built for Workday, OSV sees the potential of expanding this to include integration with additional leading cloud HCM platforms in the longer term.

Over the past ten years, OSV has established itself as a disrupter in the HR services space, becoming the first HRO provider to anchor its services entirely to a major cloud platform in Workday. And OSV is again disrupting the space with RPaaS – the first HR-specific Robotic Process-as-a-Service solution targeted toward the middle market buyer. With a deep set of tech savvy Workday customers willing to leverage next generation technology in their HR delivery models, OSV should see solid demand for the new solution. 

Further, with the rise in demand for open platforms and marketplaces for apps and extended solutions through APIs, OSV’s RPaaS is well-timed. With the ability to offer the solution via the partner marketplaces of technologies such as Workday, the range of customers it will have exposure to can greatly increase its brand awareness and connect OSV to a deep pool of customers seeking to enable digital HR transformation through RPA and AI.