Here are some of the typical situations where HR automation can play a key role in a company’s continued success. In every instance, inability to do fairly simple tasks - when applied en masse - can cripple a company’s performance and damage employee morale.

Picture a factory with 511 workers, 45 managers, and 2 punch clocks. Optimum production is critical to meet tight manufacturing and shipping deadlines. It is October 25th the first day of the flu season. 70 workers and 3 managers do not clock in. 31 of the 42 managers present see that some of their teams are understaffed but without directive to do otherwise they urge the available workers to work harder to make up for their missing teammates but they risk failing on almost half the deadlines.

Do the factory executives know that the factory is at risk today for not meeting its objectives? If they had known, how can the factory leadership reassign the available workforce to get the most out of the day?

Proper use of automation allows factory supervisors to assess the situation as it is unfolding, within minutes of when employees are actually clocking in. Such decisions as to which team members should be reassigned to what projects can maximize output and minimize the downside of such an occurrence.

Now imagine a staffing agency responsible for staffing several nursing homes in different locations. Nurses have different skills sets, years of experience, and location preferences. Many of these nurses require flexible schedules as well. Nursing homes similarly have their own requirements, and sometimes might need a extra help depending on patient load.

As an example, with 100 nurses and 3 nursing homes. What is the optimal way to assign the nurses to make both parties happy every day, and ensure an adequate level of patient care?

Using automation, preferences for nurses and nursing homes could be simply “plugged” into an automatic scheduling system. Now the system can do its magic to find optimal coverage, taking into account nurses’ skills, availability, place preference, and other criteria such as planned time off. If a nurse has to leave early, it is now easier to make changes and alert other nurses to cover a needed shift when necessary.

Ritchie heads a 50-person customer support team, 45-person coverage is mandatory every business day. Summer holidays are around the corner and 6 of his employees came over to ask for a few days off.

With all the other tasks he is responsible for, Ritchie is having a hard time pulling up individual employee profiles to check coverage reports and availability of others to correlate that with the mandatory coverage for each day, to determine if his department will or won’t be understaffed. Sure, he can ask his human resource manager to look it up - but she is busy recruiting new team members and does not have the time. Meanwhile the list of time off seekers grows to 10.

An automated time management system with effective leave tracking allows employees to see how much time off they have left and ask for only what they have available. Managers can see at a glance, coverage for the day with all the scheduled time-offs accounted for. A decision can be made on the spot as to whether to approve time off or not - leaving the HR manager to focus on core tasks of finding more talent.

One possible criticism of automation is that it may seem cold and impersonal - everyone’s information is in the machine, everybody’s actions controlled by a machine. However, when used correctly automation can actually relate to the team on a personal level and provide a feeling of uniformity and fair application of company policy, something most team members like - at least the one’s you want to keep around for a long time.

Factory workers can concentrate on setting realistic objectives and on seeing results at the end of the day. A nurse can rest comfortably knowing that the system will remember that every second Thursday she has to take kids to the pool and thus cannot be scheduled work on those days. And call center team members can keep track of their time off and use their available personal time to the maximum benefit.