Indosat Powering the Future of HR with RPA
The company wins at this year’s Asian Telecom Awards.
With a company as large as Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison and its 2800 employees, managing documents and keeping employee track records from onboarding until offboarding processes across different touchpoints can be challenging. Especially when the company have an average onboarding rate of 200 new hires per year and a spike of migration of 1085 employees in 2022 due to the merger. To address this issue, Indosat developed an RPA or Robotic Process Automation project named ASTRID (Administration Assistant Robotic Indosat) to assist and handle HR operations, and in doing so has won the HR Initiative of the Year - Indonesia Award at the 2023 Asian Telecom Awards.
The awards recognise the efforts and initiatives of telecom companies in navigating a challenging market and delivering top-notch services, and Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison set themselves apart from their competition thanks to ASTRID and its success in saving our employees from robot-like jobs i.e. repetitive and manual processes.
Before the rollout of ASTRID, Indosat went through around 2300 hours of manual workload every year. Although Indosat has moved to a paperless process for the past several years, all repetitive jobs were still done manually. Initially, there were several touchpoints that requires manual administration assistance from HR such as payroll and benefits distribution to more than 2000 employees, as well as administrative preparation for new hires onboarding. This included information such as employee contracts, personal and family data and documents, as well as bank information that was filled in during the onboarding process. Not to mention other HR administrative processes such as payroll, tax, insurance, personalized benefits, and other arrangements like facilities and company-issued tools of the trade during an employee’s time within the company.
With the optimisation and implementation of ASTRID into HR processes since 2020, Indosat gradually automates various touchpoints. Starting with the automation of around 2000 employees’ payroll and benefits process, ASTRID is now also handling more HR administrative processes from onboarding to offboarding of employees. This way, ASTRID has not only reduced manual labour, but it also produced a lot faster and up to 100% accuracy in results compared to human work.
In 2022, ASTRID gave its biggest impact by shortening five hours of manual processing into 18 minutes, effectively saving 4 hours and 42 minutes for the company. Aside from just reducing manual labour and information verification, ASTRID is also capable of interacting with outside-of-company digital platforms such as ordering digital stamps of duty directly from the government digital platforms.
ASTRID’s biggest impact last year as an RPA also shows how the digital worker is able to expand its skillset into handling event-based occurrences alongside BAU processes, ensuring data integrity and smooth transitions such as in the company’s merger process in data alignment and reorganization post-merger.
With almost half a day's worth of tasks removed from the HR team’s table, ASTRID paved the way not only for a seamless experience in replacing manual, unorganised, repetitive jobs but also in ensuring a more human and livelier workplace.
An unwritten benefit of ASTRID’s implementation is the humanisation of Indosat’s HR personnel. With ASTRID taking over the bulk of their administrative workload, team members are able to allocate time to more valuable jobs and develop new skill sets and competence for their careers. As a result of this, the HR team whose time was mostly used for administration duties can now focus more on analytics and insights. They were able to create a psychic machine to predict talent behaviours in the future. They also created a career simulator that enables employees to forecast steps needed for desired career trajectories.
Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison believes that the ASTRID RPA project is replicable and applicable in various processes of HR and other business units that are repetitive and rule-based. ASTRID is now positioned to optimise more administrative operations across the company, to enable the company to give a better experience to its employees
The Asian Telecom Awards is presented by Asian Telecom Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2024 awards programme and be acclaimed for delivering cutting-edge, award-winning telco products and services to customers, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected].
