Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Offices
Timeless Learning Technologies
(Summer Internship Project Report)
AS A PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE CURRICULUM
FOR THE DEGREE
Declaration
I, Mr. Nikhil Prabhakar Tavase, studying in the second year of MASTERS OF
MANAGEMENT STUDIES (MMS) at SIES College of Management Studies, Nerul,
Navi Mumbai, hereby declare that I have completed the Summer Internship Project
titled Use Of Office Automation Tools To Improve Efficiency In Offices as a part
of the course requirements for Masters of Management Studies (MMS) Program.
I also declare that the work undertaken by me is original and has not been copied from
any sources. I further declare that the information presented in this project is true and
original knowledge and has not been submitted to SIESCOMS or any other Institute
for any other examination.
Date:
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Acknowledgements
I, the student of SIES College of Management Studies would like to thank my project
guide, Mrs. Geetanjali Kulkarni, Business Development Manager and Mr. Aniruddha
Shrotri Co-Founder and CTO, for their involvement in my project work and timely
assessment that provided me inspiration and valued guidance throughout my study.
I would like to thank our Systems & I.T. Dean Mrs. Ela Goyal and my Academic
Mentor Mrs. Roshna Ravindran for their timely guidance and evaluation of my ongoing project work which helped me in making my project brief and knowledgeable.
I would like to thank Mr. Ravindra Ambegaonkar for his constant insights at every step.
I am thankful to him for having dedicated his time and energy for helping me with the
entire project.
I am also thankful to all seen and unseen hands and heads, which have been direct or
indirect help, in the completion of this project.
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Executive Summary
CareersUnbound is a start-up providing Cognitive hiring solutions to organizations with
the help of its advanced algorithms and a tie-up with IBM Supercomputer WATSON.
It is also a provider of other HR automation products like PDF Esigner, Form 16 Signer
and another digital signature solutions provider.
Firstly, being a start-up, the company image in the market was something that we
needed to build. We had to take into consideration multiple factors like our competitors
product, our capabilities and how well can we match and exceed the expectations of
our clients. Along with my mentor, we devised a plan on how to proceed with the
marketing of the product and listed down everything stage by stage. We did a weekly
review of how well have we achieved our targets and started working to bridge the gaps
that had to be filled. All this way we were assisted by our own HR software which
helped us acquire the best possible talent that there is for the available job positions.
Brand Building was the major objectives that had to be achieved and Marketing
Automation tool like Act-on is the thing that helped us achieve it and that too keeping
up with the client needs and fulfil our commitments to our clients.
Our organization used tools like SendBlaster 3.16, instaTalent, Hyperion for the
specialized features that they have on offer. Along with Act-On, SendBlaster was used
to send multiple emails at one go. The tool had customizability to a great extent. We
customized emails for every prospective client with their names and also different
salutations. It also had an option of saving a draft for future uses.
instaTalent was used for our own hiring purposes. instaTalent helped the company
recruit 3 Software professions out of which one was recruited as Team Lead. The new
hires have proven beneficial in their first month itself which proves the worth of our
indigenously developed software instaTalent.
Hyperion helped the company in its monthly financial closing and proved useful for
other jobs which were to be linked with company financials.
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Table of Contents
1.
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... 1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
OBJECTIVES ................................................................................................................ 9
STATE-OF-MARKETING-AUTOMATION-................................................................... 10
2.2
2.3
AUTOMATION IN HR ........................................................................................................ 20
3.1
INSTATALENT ........................................................................................................... 23
3.2
E-LOCK ................................................................................................................... 28
4.2
4.3
4.4
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
5.6
HYPERION ................................................................................................................ 53
SUGGESTIONS: .......................................................................................................... 55
6.2
RECOMMENDATIONS: ............................................................................................... 55
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 56
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1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 COMPANY OVERVIEW
Timeless Learning Technologies (TLT) is one of the market leaders for providing
Education Process Outsourcing services globally. Companys end to end E-Learning
offers LMS- Learning Management Systems and Employee Training Portal (E-Three),
SCORM compliant Content Digitization and Creation services etc. The newest venture
of the Management is Careers Unbound which promises candidate recruitment
simplicity with its advanced algorithms, taxonomies and other such things. Careers
Unbound offers recruitment across many domains like BFSI, IT, ITES, Healthcare and
fields like Education and Manufacturing are in pipeline. Timeless Learning
Technologies is a premier provider of online and blended learning solutions and
services. By combining eLearning development, learning management, collaboration
technologies and career oriented approach we deliver solutions that help organizations
to create high performing culture.
CareersUnbound
Employee hiring is always a tedious job for companies. Most of the times the HR
manager has to go through a long hiring process which includes posting job openings
on job portals, contacting interested candidates, collecting resumes, sorting resumes
manually, conducting rounds of interview with selected candidates, hiring the selected
candidate etc. It is a tedious and time-consuming process.
To address this issue Dr. Prakash Ambegaonkar and Aniruddha Shrotri came up with
an online solution, and launched CareersUnbound. Since Employee hiring and training
are two major activities in every organization, they also decided to launch online
solution for corporate employee training and skill development. instaTalent was
launched to reduce the issue of employee recruitment, since it is a very critical and time
& resource consuming process, and could take weeks or months to hire desired best-fit
candidate. If an employer is hiring candidates from five different recruitment portals,
then it would be more expensive. It would be better if employer can access data from
all recruitment portals within one recruitment software. The Company has implemented
the same technical functionality within our recruitment software instaTalent.
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Office automation may include simple things like a computer, copier, calculator or even
a printer for that matter. All these instruments help in faster processing of work. But
automation these days has moved light years ahead in terms of speed and simplicity of
use. Automation helps in decreasing manual work and save time for businesses to a
great extent.
Office automation refers to the varied computer machinery and software used to
digitally create, collect, store, manipulate, and relay office information needed for
accomplishing basic tasks and goals. Raw data storage, electronic transfer, and the
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Office Automation can also be called as business process automation which is pretty
easy to be implemented in offices given the long run benefits and the ROI being so
huge for so less an investment. Most of the business processes these days can be
automated using Computer Software. There is some or the other tool for automating
your jobs in the organization, its just that you have to have your eyes open, so that you
can find the perfect automation tool for your office or your jobs. Automation
streamlines the business processes, reduces workload on humans along with increasing
the efficiency, reduces expenses incurred on the specific jobs, it also helps in
automating the supply chain management of the organization all of which adds to
organizations profits in some way or the other. Process automation systems can capture
and collect critical key performance indicators and make that data available to facilitate
optimization of the process.
Manual efforts, poor handing off between different departments or partners and the
inability to monitor the overall progress results in significant waste of time money and
other resources. Automation in creation of shorter cycle times for processes. In the age
where Time is Money, automating processes helps in keeping the process going making
the hand-offs seamlessly easy, consistency is assured and the cycle times are shortened
drastically. It assures Consistent Process Implementation. Corporate Governance and
Compliance is another aspect for which Automation helps in. The systems cannot be
biased or you cannot corrupt the machine as you can corrupt a person by offering bribe.
Everything becomes documented and hence there is no chance to escape any wrong
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doing. The organizations become financially accountable for whatever they are doing
in their organization due to the well documented proof. It leads to eradication of Frauds
and scams which can easily happen if there is human intervention. Implementing
automation gives you the ability to change and adapt quickly which provides an obvious
business advantage and improved customer satisfaction.
Employees these days have higher expectations in regards to what their office space
has to be. They want their offices to be smart and not just a place where they come to
work daily. Employees do not want to maintain their systems and waste valuable time,
instead they want to automate their surroundings in order to increase efficiency.
Automation techniques have been very helpful in many ways for organizations. Basics
like storage of information, data exchange and data management have formed the
backbone of the organizations.
These three factors extend not only to the technical systems running the office, but also
to, building access, people management and other internal systems of the office or
organization.
When put in practice, office automation might look different for different types of
offices.
Automated processes and software assist you in creating the flow of the office, not force
a different workflow for the employees. It also helps define your own access controls
and to streamline approval processes, all from the cloud.
Defining this workflow gets difficult as more businesses become flexible with their
office time some businesses may want a smartphone access control system to allow
employees to come and go, while others might need digital video software to connect
with co-workers on the web.
For me, technology has brought the concept of work outside of the office,
Madhusudan Thakur, Regional Vice president of South Asia, Regus says.
What this means is that work isnt somewhere you go, its something you do. All of
this is enabled through the adoption and implementation of new technology platforms.
For me, a smart office is a physical and technological platform that allows you to work
anywhere.
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The idea of office automation is to offer the employees of the organization the
flexibility and reliability to work. If the office systems arent automated, consider
getting it done as it is the need of the hour.
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CURRENT SCENARIO
The world is plagued with slower efficiency and low productivity in many
fields. To get the best out of technology, and generate profits for the organization is the
main motive of all the higher level management executives. Age of machines has
brought about a drastic change in the field of manufacturing and other related fields.
But the core functions still suffer from lower productivity due to lack of automation in
their day to day processes. With the mindset of people changing and with JOB SWITCH
becoming more and more important for employees, the companies are facing huge
financial losses dealing with their employee hiring. Not just in the field of HR, this is a
scenario which is existing in fields of Marketing and Finance especially banking sector.
Lack of automation and lesser use of machines the finance domain suffers from loads
and loads of paperwork and processing such huge amounts of paperwork, instead of
progressing. is dragging the financial sector down.
Automation is the thing that can improve the condition of these 3 major sectors
of any organization, but it has to be taken into consideration that if not done properly,
the automation concept can backfire and lead to complete disaster within an
organization.
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One of the main issues is the Hiring Managers are still not very technology
favouring. They are hesitant to use a Software for the jobs that they are used to
doing for so many years.
Threat to data is always going to be there, considering the fact that hackers are
always on the prowl.
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1.4 OBJECTIVES
To study the effectiveness of Office Automation tools on 3 major domains of any
organization: HR, Marketing, Finance.
To understand current trends in the market about automation and how can it be
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2 LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 STATE-OF-MARKETING-AUTOMATIONMarketing automation technology is being used by more and more marketing teams to
get messages to the right recipients at the right time, find qualified leads and get detailed
information on how customers are engaging with brands. With the help of marketing
automation, campaigns can be deployed more quickly, targeting the most relevant
recipients and saving huge amounts of time for marketing teams. And more time a good
thing, because the market landscape is constantly shifting, and consumers are moving
faster than marketers. This technology is not just an enabler or commodity the way it
has been historically, its inspiring creativity and creating stories, says Mayur Gupta,
global head of marketing technology & operations for Kimberly-Clark, who spoke at
the recent MarTech conference in Boston. The exciting part of this evolution lies in the
fact that marketing automation is now creating new business models for marketers,
allowing them to sort through data and find leads in new ways, and get immediate
feedback on whats working and what isnt.
A NEW LANDSCAPE
Technologies such as marketing automation are changing the way marketers are doing
business, says Laura McLellan, vice president, marketing strategies for Gartner
Research, who also presented at MarTech. Marketings focus is still on the customer,
but companies are now turning their focus to the web, e-business opportunities and
digital marketing. The future is digital business and automation. Business
opportunities without people in between will become the norm, McLellan says.
Marketing is about disruption and getting peoples attention, she says, and disruption
at a technology level is already happening and will only proliferate. The big impacts
this shift is having on the marketing world is that the customer is now in charge of the
sales process, as online research and price comparisons have put them in the drivers
seat. McLellan says this has affected the traditional sales funnel, as many customers are
more than halfway to a purchasing decision before talking to a sales representative.
Data is the driver of decisions and innovative technology underlies it all, McLellan
says, adding that research indicates that spending on marketing automation and other
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tech solutions is on the rise across the board. McLellan says that Gartners research
shows that two-thirds of companies will increase expenditures on marketing tech in the
coming year, including automation solutions.
Everything we see points to increased spending very few people are staying flat.
Among CEOs, digital marketing technology is the number one most important area of
investment to improve business over the next five years, McLellan says. The budget
for the marketing funding increase will likely be coming out of sales budgets, she says.
Were seeing a reduction in selling expenses, McLellan says.
CUTTING EDGE SOLUTIONS
Some marketing automation suppliers are now expanding their business offerings in an
effort to help clients get the most out of their tech solutions. Weve expanded our
services to include strategic services, strategy content management. We call it revenue
marketing. This allows clients to get up and running quickly and transition their team
into the lead role in automation, says Scott Benedetti, vice president of sales and
revenue marketing, The Pedowitz Group.
Pedowitz is now putting marketing automation programs and plans in place for clients
across multiple channels. Were executing in that regard for clients now and were
proposing for folks to outsource to us, just like they would a traditional marketing
agency. We set up the marketing automation system, run the system, put the content
into the system and they use us as the subject matter expert to help them achieve
success, says Benedetti.
The Pedowitz Group sees that as a viable strategy for clients who are new to the
marketing automation space as their ramp-up plan, as marketing automation is a big
investment in marketing automation, and they can help get new systems up and running
very quickly. The Pedowitz services team gets things going at the beginning of the
process, then client team members are slowly plugged in and the knowledge is
transferred over to them, so they can take over ownership of the entire program in the
future.
Thats become a viable option for marketers from an onboarding standpoint, as
opposed to doing some training, building a nurture program, figuring out a content plan,
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then a year or two later theyre fully executing all of the functions that are available in
marketing automation, Benedetti says.
COMMUNICATING WITH SALES
One problem Benedetti regularly sees when newcomers adopt automation systems is
marketers getting excited about the latest tech solutions and getting funding for
marketing automation, but then falling short in implementing the solutions properly.
That includes getting the sales team on board with the Marketing automation
companies are masters at selling their products and selling the upside of what can
happen with those products. When you get that new technology, it doesnt mean you
know exactly where to go with it. If the sales team is not on board with it, its just
another lead gen source. So if you dont actually put the processes in place to bring
those two groups together, then you are inevitably not going to see as much success,
Benedetti says. A third party can help facilitate that communication, and suppliers can
work with marketers to put a change management plan in place and educate team
members on new processes. That set of strategies can include lead management, lead
management processes, technology dataflow processes, reporting plans and
dashboards, content management and audience engagement.
When you integrate marketing automation and CRM, youre able to see that digital
interaction, and you can leverage those in a strategic pursuit for the entire process, from
awareness, when you first get that prospect all the way through to the close, and
thereafter, advocacy, Benedetti says.
AUTOMATION REQUIRES NEW SKILLSETS
With new advancements in marketing tech come new skillsets that marketers need to
get the most out of it. Companies bring in these technologies and if they dont have
the skillsets that you need to build, execute, analyze in a continuous fashion, then youre
not taking full advantage of it. And if you do have some of those skillsets, companies
are often resource-constrained by the number of people they have in those skillsets,
Bendetti says.
If marketing teams dont have the strategies, the content pieces, the communication
plans and the reporting to make sure that it all works together, then it can take up to
nine months to two years before you have it all up and running properly.
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PR 20/20 CEO and author Paul Roetzer says the talent war for tech-savvy hybrid
marketers who are fluent in the language of automation has already begun, and that its
up to marketing teams to train their own marketing technology specialists.
This new breed of marketers is capable of building, managing and executing fullyintegrated campaigns that produce results, and are the types that execs want to build
their teams around, says Roetzer, who spoke at the MarTech conference.
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC
While marketing automation and other tech solutions can make life easier for a
marketing department, its important to remember to keep the customers needs at the
forefront.
We tend to get obsessed with technologies or channels and we end up creating ideas
that make you wonder whos going to use them. Keep your focus on the customers and
what problems your solutions will solve for them, Gupta says.
The flexibility and speed of marketing automation provides value in many ways
including learning about which programs and tactics arent working. The moment you
accept failure; youre lowering the bar. Remember, Failure is getting one step closer to
finding which solution will work.
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studies show that HR automation helps in achieving primarily four objectives i.e reduce
on time spent on administrative work, cost reduction, self-services and morale.
Another piece of study of Cedar (formerly The Hunter Group) found that HR
automation reduce cost by an average of 60 per cent in HR administrative processes.
The GIGA Information Group clarified that HR automation can reduce the time spend
on administrative work from 40 per cent to 50 per cent by the HR managers.
In a study of University of Southern California's Center concluded that HR automation
benefits the organizations as follows 20 per cent higher return on investment, 20 per
cent higher return on assets and 13 per cent higher return on equity. The piece of
remarkable study conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found
that 60 per cent to 80 per cent of an HR staff time is tied to repetitive administrative
tasks. Much of this time is spent answering employee and manager questions and
gathering information for reports.
A survey conducted by IOMAs on HR management and cost control took the sample
size of 149 respondents (HR professionals) from different areas of HR processes and
procedures of recruitment and hiring through web based applications and intranet and
they concluded that HR professional reducing cost control via web based applications
and intranet 62.8 per cent and 54.7 per cent respectively.
Keil Colchester has given notable suggestion to the organizations to go with
implementation of web-based / cloud solutions rather than software based hardware.
You can choose any new software solutions for not only to streamline your HR
processes, but also to enhance your company role as a leader by establishing your
company as a workplace of choice that put the value of people at its core.
positive feedback loop that accelerates the acceleration. The extension of computers in
recent decades has been created the most important change in knowledge system since
the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, or even the invention of writing.
Parallel to these extraordinary changes is the expansion of networks and new media
which was equally amazing; their function is handling knowledge and its elements; i.e.
data and information (Curtin et al., 1998). Regardless of the used technology, human
factor has always played a decisive role in performing organizational activities for
former and today's organizations. This means that the organization is not just a merely
technical unit or a social system; but this is a system requiring the combination and
integration of human activities in the field of different technologies which affect the
improvement of organizational performance. Office automation is also a product of
technology which undoubtedly has had and will have a significant effect on
organizational performance. This effect can be positive or negative; because each new
technology has its own consequences and can reduce or improve performance,
depending on the technology type as well as training, (Hammer, 1982).
Office Automation
Since 1960s, due to expansion of more aspects in functions and activities of business
and offices, the need for an appropriate integrated office system which involves huge
amount of information, communications, and correspondence has been considered.
These systems have been called with different names; but the most popular ones,
especially for highest level of automation systems, are called office automation. There
is no clear and exact definition for these systems; they are limited to determining the
user's perspective. This means that office automation system has many definitions
(Habibie, 2004, p. 40).
Office automation is the use of electronic devices in order to increase performance.
Enhanced performance results from the evolution of information exchange within and
between offices and their environment; thus, it can benefit manager by providing better
information for decision-making (Beheshtian & Abolhassani, 1994, p. 297). Office
automation
systems
are
information
systems
which
create
administrative
correspondence in written, oral, or visual form and transfer them after storing,
modifying, and displaying (Sarafizadeh, 2007, p. 167). In other words, office
automation includes all formal and informal electronic systems relating the
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communication between individuals within and outside of organization, and vice versa.
Office automation facilitates communication in both oral and written forms (Mac Loid,
1999, p. 48). Office automation system refers to the systematic use of computer and
communication systems in order to support administrative procedures in office
environment (Olson et al., 1982, p. 838).
Currently, all units in Zahedan University of Medical Sciences use office automation
online. All correspondence including internal, external, outgoing and incoming are
performed through this system. It should be said that the letter for outside of the
university are sent in print with original signature.
One of the main reasons for applying information technology in the office environment
is to enhance productivity of people and employees. As researches show, while
increasing productivity in different organizational areas has increasingly been
considered and improved, but the productivity in the field of office affairs has been
neglected. Since then, office automation has been considered (Nowruz & Mousavi
madam, 2006, p. 6).
If mechanizing office affairs actually leads to increase productivity, its effect on
organization will be as follows:
The most important condition for applying automation in most organizations relates to
the speed and accuracy in their work. It is because of development in operation domain
of organizations that relationship channels with more speed are required. Office
automation will facilitate availability of short relationship channels and required
communication for managers. Generally, the benefits of applying office automation
systems can be classified into two categories:
A) Direct benefits: These benefits include increased products or productivity and
savings in Tim and labor. Such benefits are usually measurable and may have direct
and short-term effect on cash flow.
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B)
Indirect benefits:
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3 AUTOMATION IN HR
Timesheets.
Employee recruitment.
Employee on-boarding
Tax forms
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3.1 INSTATALENT
The cognitive talent discovery and recommendation
platform of the century
Source: wwwo.careersunbound.com
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Employee recruiting is a hefty task. It requires lot of efforts and costly processes
involving lot of human engrossment. Many companies follow the tedious process of
posting jo on multiple job sites, subscribing to various job boards, collecting referrals
and yet they are unable to fill up the positions without running into problems.
instaTalent directly addresses these problems and provides industry specific
recommendations of talent.
Launched in Nov 2014, their office is located in Pune, India. With a team of 20-25
employees, we get 5-10 registrations per day for our software. Some of our major
customers till date are Kirloskar group of industries, Collage Media solutions, Synonym
HR Solution and Singapore based Entstrat Consulting
instaTalent is a web based SaaS which is highly intellectual talent acquisition platform
that shortens your hiring cycle from a few days down to just few minutes. Instead of
going through hundreds and hundreds of applications that you get on job portals and
then selecting one specific candidate is a thing of the past. All you have to do is upload
your available JOB DESCRIPTION or fill out the form manually and let instaTalent
work its magic.
instaTalent is a web based Cognitive Talent Recommendation Platform. It is the one
and only one talent recommendation platform which has the capacity to give candidate
recommendations which are both Skill Fit as well as Culture Fit for the organization.
It comes in 2 versions: instaTalent PRO and instaTalent Culture Fit.
instaTalent PRO has the ability to give candidate recommendations which are SKILL
FIT for the required job and instaTalent Culture Fit gives you candidate
recommendations which have the required personality traits for the available job
positions. It is a talent acquisition platform that offers an instant online employee hiring
solution. instaTalent understands your JOB DESCRIPTION and searches through
multiple sources like job portals, job boards, private databases etc. for the best fit
candidates. The process which runs in background is as follows:
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CareersUnbound has tied up with IBM to use their Super Computer WATSON. Unlike
other computing systems, Watson takes any sort of unstructured data from reports to
tweets, blogs, etc. in seconds to save time and effort. Next it will process all the
unstructured data to evaluate and interpret them. The system provides results in a faster
and more accurate manner than any other industry expert. Watson is revolutionizing the
decision making process. Big data is a growing trend in the industry, CareersUnbound
takes it a step further. As a technology company, we take pride in our patent pending
cognitive talent discovery engine. Careers Unbound uses its proprietary Cognitive
Talent Discovery Engine in order to process job descriptions and in turn filter out top
candidates. Our Cognitive Talent Discovery Engine uses big data, social web
extraction, taxonomies and our algorithms to ensure the best-fit candidates. InstaTalent
is currently available on Google play and the IOS app stores. The mobile app makes it
easy to upload a job description, submit your criteria and find candidates on the go.
From keeping better retention rate to improving organizational productivity, culture- fit
has become vital part. CareersUnbound is developing Culture fit add on by becoming
eco system partner of IBM Watson, which is one of its kind.
With instaTalent Culture-Fit companies know their candidates personality attributes
better. Talent acquisition is not only for attracting and hiring top talent but to retain the
top talent also. With instaTalent, hiring managers can hire candidates who are best fir
for the job and Culture-Fit for the job and Culture-Fit for the organization. The main
goal of instaTalent Culture-Fit powered by IBM Watson is to provide the employer
more comprehensive understanding of the candidates personality attributes.
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Culture-Fit is based on an idea of hiring a synchronous workforce who shares the same
thought process as the company and the same culture to create a more successful and
productive team. A good culture fit employee gels in quickly and works well above par
in the work environment.
Culture-Fit powered by IBM Watson is a package that enables the Hiring Managers to
hire candidates on the basis of their Cognitive Analysis. Culture-Fit enables the hiring
managers to know the candidate as never before without even having to interview them.
As a result of this the employers receive Best-Fit candidates for their job positions in
the organizations.
Source: www.careersunbound.com
This is the Graph of instaTalent Culture-Fit in which Scoring is done from 1 to 100
with 100 being the highest level of being most desired quality. Higher the greens better
are those qualities in that person.
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3.2 E-LOCK
E-commerce. A lot is being talked about e-commerce in the past 5 years or so, the
growth the scalability and its advantages. The statistics are overwhelming and the
advantages are such that every shop owner these days is looking to enter into Online
Trading of his or her goods. But the speed at which the E-commerce boom is going, a
handful of the businessmen have managed to keep pace with it and others have left far
behind.
E-business has helped businessmen break multiple barriers like Geographical, Physical
and more importantly the barriers of Timely delivery. E-commerce has brought with it
multiple benefits like the ones belonging to time, cost and efficiency etc. Till recent
times the E-commerce transactions were majorly for the B2C kind of transactions
because the organizations felt that E-commerce transactions are not secure and may
lead to losses if implemented in their businesses.
This has changed a lot in the past few years with the arrival Digital Signatures and their
acceptance by Governments all over the world. Legalization of Digital Signatures has
led businesses all over the world to accept the Digital Signatures and implement it in
their organizations as well. Digital Signatures have made transacting over the internet
a lot safer and very much secured for businesses and also for the consumers.
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This process is pretty similar to the ones used while using Credit Card for performing
transactions. Your Identity is verified before being issued a credit card. The places
where we use this card are trusting the Card issuer and not us directly. These cards are
valid only for a limited period of time and are renewed by the Credit card issuing
Authority after that time expires. This is exactly the same principle on which Digital
Certificates work. For Digital Certificates The owner of the Digital Certificate uses
his/her Private key for a Transaction and the others who want the job done use their
public key.
The significance of having two different keys in a PKI based transaction is that the
public key, which is freely distributed, cannot be used for participating in a transaction,
it can only be used for identification and verification. Only the private key, which is
under the sole control of the owner can be used for participation in transactions.
A digital certificate establishes your credentials when doing business or other
transactions on the Web. In simple words Digital Certificate is the attachment to an
electronic message used for security purposes. The common use of a digital certificate
is to verify that a user sending a message is who he or she claims to be, and to provide
the receiver with the means to encode a reply. Digital Certificate provides a means of
proving your identity in electronic transactions; just like a drivers license or a passport
does. You can present a Digital Certificate electronically to prove your identity or your
right to access information or services online.
A Digital Signature Typically Contains:
1. Owner's public key
2. Owner's name
3. Expiration date of the public
4. Name of the issuer (the CA that issued the Digital Certificate)
5. Serial number of the Digital Certificate
6. Digital signature of the issuer
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Non Repudiation: Now that authentication and data integrity are established, the
only thing that remains is to bind signers to the information that they sign. This is
exactly like in a real-world business process where once your signature is on a
document, you are legally bound to it and its content. Even at a later date, none of the
participants in the transaction can deny their involvement.
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Time Stamping:
These signatures are time bound i.e they have specific validity with respect to time.
What this means is if a document has been signed today, but if the signature expires in
a year or two the tool used must be able to identify that the signature was valid when
the document was signed. Otherwise future validations of the documents will not be
possible.
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Multiple Signatures:
If there are multiple parties which have to be a part of any agreement or other such
things like the NDA etc., All the parties involved have to sign the document and each
of the digital signature has to be verified independently.
4 AUTOMATION IN MARKETING
Marketing Automation is a platform that marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage and
measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline.
Marketing Automation is the use of software and technology designed for marketing
departments and organizations to effectively market products on various channels
online such as via Websites, Social Media, Email etc. and automate some tasks which
are repetitive in nature.
Marketing professionals, consultants and the part timers benefit largely by specifying
the criteria and the outcomes for tasks and different processes which are stored,
executed and interpreted by different software tools in turn increasing efficiency and
reducing human dependency and also human errors. Marketing traditionally focussed
only on email marketing automation, but it has now widened its scope with many
different tools for marketing which provide analytical features which are especially
used for inbound marketing. These automation platforms are used as web-based
solutions or as a hosted solution but no software installation is required by a customer.
The use of a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing
organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated
solutions.
53%
OF
MARKETERS
COMMUNICATION
AND
SAY
NURTURING
CONTINUED
OF
THEIR
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Real-time alerts:
Alerts indicate to sales representatives the changing readiness of potential buyers. They
can also indicate which campaigns are generating positive or negative responses,
enabling quick changes to underperforming campaigns.
follow-up.
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Lead segmentation:
Segmentation helps carve up your prospects and assign leads to groups with common
characteristics,
including
customer
demographics
and
buying
behavior.
Lead nurturing:
Most leads need to be nurtured before they are ready to make a purchase, and a
marketing automation system needs automated methods for cultivating these leads.
Nurture marketing campaigns allow marketers to create content distribution based on
buyer profiles and to send messages to prompt leads at the right times. Nurture
campaigns also use lead scoring to identify leads that are closer to buying.
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Forms:
These tools allow prospects to submit information into your marketing system when
registering on a form, subscribing to a newsletter or completing a survey. This data
populates the system and doesn't have to be input from paper forms or ported from
another application.
Analytics capabilities:
Analytics capabilities are immensely important to get information about customers
and prospects. Analytics enable you to track online visitor behavior on websites, in
email campaigns, and even data from phone calls and other non-digital channels.
Analytics help marketers measure the success of their campaigns and can work in
tandem with lead scoring to identify prospects and tune campaigns to particular
audience segments based on demographics.
Data management:
Most marketing automation applications include the ability to scrub data before it
comes into the system to remove duplicate, partial, bogus or otherwise inaccurate data.
Data hygiene is critical to analytics; if you have bad data coming in to the system, it
can affect the accuracy of your analytics.
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Using the social profile lookups available in a marketing automation platform, sales
reps can tap into the wealth of social data that their prospects are sharing, see where
their prospects are engaging online, develop valuable one-to-one relationships, and
jump into conversations with targeted, relevant information.
Which mediums and platforms are for personal use, and which are for business?
Sales reps are conducting business engagements, so they should be responding via
business mediums. Dont comment on your prospects Facebook statusinstead, shoot
them an email or reach out over Twitter. Its all about mutual respect, says Salesforce.
com marketing evangelist Mathew Sweezey.
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5 AUTOMATION IN FINANCE
Some of the prominent Banks of the world have managed to achieve rapid and large
scale process automation. This is possible due to their sheer size and power that they
command in the market. Looking at this the competitors are trying to cash in on the
opportunity and are trying to automate their own back offices for improved efficiency
and growth as of the bigger banks.
Now-a-days banks are in process of automating many of their customer facing front
end operations with digital solutions. Online banking as an example, offers enormous
convenience to consumers and with the advent of mobile payments and NFC mode of
payment, need for cash is slowly being eliminated.
All that said, banks still have many processes that are reliant on humans and on paper.
Back offices are the major places where all the manual processing is being done for all
the processes of the banks and handling customer requests. High amount of manual
processing is costly as well as slow, and it often leads to inconsistent results and has a
high error rate.
IT has done wonders to whatever field it has touched. And this is one of fields which
IT can automate and hence help the banks to eliminate such problems and errors which
exist in the back offices etc.
Research has indicated that a huge opportunity exists to improve the levels of
automation in back offices of banks. Just by reworking their IT architecture, banks can
have much smaller and operational units running value-adding tasks, which includes
complex processes, such as deal origination, and activities that require human
intervention, such as financial reviews.
IT-enabling operations takes into consideration both automating processes that is
preventing customers from using paper, digitizing work flows, and automating or
supporting decision making and using IT solutions to manage residual operations that
must be carried out manually for example, using software for resource planning. Taking
full advantage of this approach, banks can often generate an improvement of more than
50 percent in productivity and customer service.
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Many banks are already taking bold steps towards harnessing the huge potential of this
opportunity. They are trying to grab this opportunity with both hands in order to take
full advantage of it. As per one finding, one of the major banks categorized its more
than 900 end to end processes into 3 categories, which are FULLY AUTOMATED,
PARTIALLY AUTOMATED. LEAN MANUAL.
The findings of this were, around 85% of the jobs are performed by 80% of the FULL
TIME EMPLOYEES can be partially automated. If things are implemented as required,
then almost 50% of the back office staff could be relieved of their tasks.
This scenario sounds promising, but achieving it is easier said than done. This bank
then did some due diligence to determine whether there was a viable business case to
automate each process within a reasonable time frame. It concluded that only half the
opportunity (measured by the automation business cases completed on each manual
process) could actually be captured. Several barriers led to this conclusion.
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5.1 CHALLENGES
FACED
WHILE
IMPLEMENTING
AUTOMATION
Banks have rarely given their procedures a thought. Enabling growth and launching
new products is what banks have kept as their priority and done traditionally. They have
achieved this by adding new layers of product features and procedural requirements.
Lack of procedural rigor has made the processes highly complex which become very
difficult to automate.
Mergers and acquisitions, different product launches and regulatory changes have made
the IT architecture of banks a complicated one. Redesigning entrenched systems may
take in upwards of half a decade and can cost hundreds of millions of Dollars. For doing
this, banks have to invest substantial amounts of capital and run the risk that, if at all
the solution misses the mark or takes too long to implement in the market, the market
may have moved on even before the new system goes live.
IT departments have different agendas and lack the required understanding of business
priorities. The IT department usually discusses IT changes happening all over the world
and therefore they fail to grasp the full spectrum of integration options. On one hand
the IT architects and Solution designers are inclined to use legacy techniques or select
the most technically exciting solutions, while on the other hand IT vendors and system
integrators are not that enthusiastic as they do not get any incentive to reduce the
complexity of the integration or the effort it requires.
Banks often lack the internal capabilities to introduce more automated processes. IT
departments have historically been trained to use waterfall methodologies1 when
developing big projects. These methodologies1are appropriate for developing and
maintaining the traditional mainframe environments in which banks still run their core
banking systems, but they are not optimally suited to automating business processes
rapidly.
Faced with the above challenges, very few banks have felt the need for reengineering
their operations-related IT systems. Given the relatively strong growth, that the banks
experienced before the recession, most did not have to change their business processes.
But scenarios have changed and changed for the good, the new economics of banking
requires much lower back-office costs. With regulators and consumers pressuring
banks for greater transparency, and heavily expedited data processing for customer
accounts, bank leaders are realizing they must take a different approach.
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than it had been in previous automation efforts: the project generated a return on
investment of 75 percent and payback in just 15 months.
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As some banks experiment with this rapid-automation approach, and the impact of
initial pilots resounds throughout the organization, IT and operations teams will feel
pressured to integrate all end-to-end and back-office processes. All too often, however,
efforts to scale up these initiatives are short lived. IT architecture teams, concerned that
they will not master unfamiliar integration solutions, or that additional efforts will make
the IT landscape even more complex, may react warily. Meanwhile, operations and
business personnel push to automate everything everywhere as soon as possible,
without proper planning and evaluation. These pressures spread IT teams too thin,
diverting their attention from the largest areas of opportunity. Because such projects are
carried out much more quickly than traditional development efforts, IT departments
struggle to set up the necessary infrastructure on time, and the teams are not focused on
the value or necessity of additional features.
To overcome these obstacles, banks must design and orchestrate automationtransformation programs that prioritize and sequence initiatives for maximum impact
on business and operations. They also need to define a target IT architecture (both
applications and infrastructure) that uses a variety of integration solutions while
maintaining a systems integrity.
Successful large-scale automation programs need much more than a few successful
pilots. They require a deep understanding of where value originates when processes are
IT enabled; careful design of the high-level target operating model and IT architecture;
and a concrete plan of attack, supported by a business case for investment.
Another European bank launched a strategic initiative to shrink its cost base and
increase competitiveness through superior customer service. Upon completion of the
first successful pilots, the banks automation program consisted of three phases.
In phase one, the bank examined ten macro end-to-end business processes, including
retail-account opening and wholesale customer service requests, to identify the
automation potential and to prioritize efforts.
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In phase two, the architecture was designed and a plan of attack formulated. The bank
took three critical actions:
It designed the building blocks of the target application architecture, which consisted
of legacy systems and off-the-shelf applications, as well as the IT infrastructure
requirements, to provide timely and necessary computing and storage.
It derived a design-based holistic business case for the automation program and defined
the rollout plan.
In phase three, the bank implemented the new processes in three- to six-month waves,
which included a detailed diagnostic and solution design for each process, as well as
the rollout of the new automated solution.
This approach helped the bank to deliver business and operational benefits rapidly and
successfully. The program paid for itself by the second year and kept implementation
risks under control.
Rapid process automation in banking used to be a fantasy. But in a world marked by
financial and economic woes, banks need to find faster, more economical, and lowerrisk approaches to reducing costs and improving customer service. Fortunately, the
market for integration support solutions and alternative IT-development approaches has
become more reliable over the past ten years, unlocking the key to rapid, large-scale
automation of business processes. Banks cannot afford to miss the opportunity to
automate now.
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5.6
HYPERION
This is one example of how financial closing software can help any organization in
speedy processes. Hyperion by Atomic helps in this process and gives your organization
the much wanted lead over the competitors.
Oracle Hyperion Financial Management is a financial consolidation and reporting
application built with advanced web technology. It provides financial managers with
the ability to rapidly consolidate and report financial results, meet global regulatory
requirements, reduce the cost of compliance and deliver confidence in their numbers.
Most of the times, multiple manual as well as automated processes have to be executed
in order to transfer financial data into Hyperion Applications. Information can be fed
regularly but it doesnt provide readiness of information at all times.
Calculations and consolidations can be scheduled without any prior knowledge
concerning the relevance of the state of financial data meaning the results are of an
unknown quality.
Slow, manual and reliable is usually the state of most of the Oracle financial closing
process in most of the organizations. Subsidiary closing is often late or incomplete also
consolidation is too slow and departmental managers frequently point out errors in
reports owing to the slow Oracle financial implementation process.
Its very difficult to escape these challenges. The financial period close process is a one
of the most vital, non-negotiable business process, but completing that close process is
tough. It usually involves many manual steps, owing to the multiple dependencies
between processes. Hyperion Oracle Financial Close solution removes the whole
manual input required by the Oracle financial period close process. By automating
Oracle financial close functions that typically require manual input, Hyperion increases
the efficiency of the financial period close process, resulting in much shorter periodend closings.
It results in giving employees more time for analysis, leads to faster feedback to the
Board and has a lesser risk of a poor audit statement. Moreover, it facilitates your
interim financial reporting and moves your business from historical performance
reporting to time to time analysis that helps in anticipating future trends.
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Hyperion also provides full documentation of all the process flows and procedures,
assures all government and corporate regulation compliances and enables you to deliver
closing reports on time every time.
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6.1 Suggestions:
Automation is the thing in todays world and organizations should invest in it
for better prospects in the future.
Employees would be wary about embracing automation, but they have to be
taken into confidence that their jobs would not be lost and that automation is
being developed to improve their efficiency on job.
Automation providing companies should cater to companies by understanding
the clients requirement and modifying the software according to its
requirement.
6.2 Recommendations:
Organizations which are focussing on some specific fields like IT or
Manufacturing or Healthcare should start venturing into other fields as well.
Organizations giving huge discounts on their products give an impression that
their product isnt up to the mark and may lose clients. So it would be better to
give gradual discounts and some extra offers instead of huge discounts at
once.
Employees need to be given training by their organizations in order to help
them cope with the automation phase and help them in getting accustomed to
the new environment also Employees have to be given time to adjust to the
new surroundings before laying them off or firing them.
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7 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dias, J., Patnaik, D., Scopa, E., & Bommel, E. (2012, Aug). Retrieved from
http://www.mckinsey.com/: http://www.mckinsey.com/businessfunctions/business-technology/our-insights/automating-the-banks-back-office
E-Lock, T. . (n.d.). Basics Of Digital Signature. Retrieved from www.elock.com:
http://www.elock.com
Gorman, P. (2016). Leveraging Marketing Automation: Best Practices for Creating New
Marketing Models. Chief Marketer.
Nawaz, N. (2014). Automation of the HR functions enhance the.
Office Automation. (n.d.). Retrieved from www.wikipedia.org:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_automation
Regalix Research. (2014). State of Marketing Automation .
Sargazi, A. A. (2007). Investigating the Effect of Office Automation on Organizational
Excellence. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social
Sciences.
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