Digital transformation in the staffing and recruitment industry is underway. New tools, new processes and automation all fostering the change. Artech an US-based women-owned IT staffing firm with a strong presence in India, China, Canada and the US and caters to multi-national clients from Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies, as well as local businesses, has seen a drastic improvement in its operations after using cloud and other advanced digital tools to automate its services.
In a recent conversation with CXOToday, Shiv Nath Ghosh, Country Director and Senior Vice President – India at Artech Information Systems, explains the new tech trends the company is witnessing in the recruitment and staffing industry as well as the recent tech deployments that are helping the company navigate the crisis.
Can you tell us a little about your India presence?
From the perspective of the Indian market, Artech has been in the industry for almost two decades now and we have multiple geographical locations including- Bangalore, Pune, Kolkata, Chennai, and Hyderabad with a workforce of over 3500 professionals. We provide a variety of services including staffing and workforce solutions, recruitment process outsourcing, project based services, and other innovative solutions like hire-train-deploy etc. We offer customized solutions to clients based on their needs and business requirements.
How has the pandemic affected the recruitment and staffing environment and how is Artech navigating these changes?
The pandemic has deeply impacted the way whole world operates and the same goes for the recruitment and staffing industry. As the entire nation came to a standstill, the recruitment industry was under tremendous stress mostly because of the uncertainty that had impacted the recruitment decisions of organizations around the world.The global slowdown in recruitment impacted us as well and we did experience some setbacks initially. However, digitization has a played a major role in this entire scenario and companies have utilized this phase to undergo transformation and future proof themselves. Now things are looking much better, and companies are optimistic about the future thus increasing their staffing requirements as well. At Artech we handled this situation proactively by reorienting our work model to full time work-from-home immediately as the pandemic started. This required making necessary technology changes and upgrades to our IT infrastructure and equipping all employees with the latest tools, technology and equipment. This has enabled employees across the company to operate seamlessly from home till now. We have also ensured that customer delivery is never compromised. During this time Artech has incorporated many health and welfare schemes for employees and ensured their well being.
How is your organization using new technologies and data insights in day-to-day operations?
Companies like ours must always be adaptable to industry demands in terms of technology, skills, and upscaling environments. Keeping up to date with new and emerging tech and making sure that we successfully implement and leverage them for our regular business operations is a must. Data is an essential part of our development and specially when it comes to the recruitment industry since we have to match the skills as per our client’s demand. Data analysis and insights tools enable us to skim through all the applications with speed and accuracy and generate insights and implement them in our day-to-day activities and seamlessly.
Have you gone through any recent transformations in the past few months?
We offer innovative, efficient, and cost-effective workforce solutions and project based solutions and leverage our digital infrastructure to the benefit of our clients. For internal use, we recently implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP solutions. Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management is very useful for managing processes like talent management, workforce management, and payroll. And Oracle Cloud ERP is assisting our finance and procurement teams to uncover underlying drivers of profitability, improve the use of working capital, and control business expenditures.
We have also procured RPA capability and have deployed bots in some Financial areas. We are looking to expand this to our HR function in near future. For data insights, we have completed a project on Microsoft Power BI to improve our reporting and data analysis capability. We also plan to leverage the Oracle BI reporting features soon.
Brief us about the challenges Artech was facing before deploying Oracle solution and how did you benefit from the recent deployment?
We were facing a couple of challenges before. First, was managing the workforce where our operations required constant communication,staying connected and that became a struggle, especially during the pandemic. Secondly, since we engage with so many stakeholders it became extremely difficult to keep a manual track of all the processes, as not only is it time-consuming but it is also prone to human errors. Our collaboration with Oracle has helped us sort out both these issues. We chose Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management and Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP solutions to our day to day business operations, improved real-time data tracking and ultimately we were able to reduce the burden on our employees to carry out these tasks manually while also performing these tasks in less than a quarter thus helping us become cost efficient. Both the solutions are easily accessible and user-friendly yet they are scalable and efficient which I think was the need of the hour for us.
Do you have any expansion plans in the next one year?
As I mentioned earlier, industries are finally opening up and the global and Indian economy is also on the path to recovery. We are seeing an upward trajectory in terms of current hiring trends. Artech is expanding rapidly across the globe,and also in India. The customer outlook & demand in India is at an unprecedented high right now and we expect the trend to continue in FY-22 too. We are optimistic about the future, and have been acquiring clients in alignment with our strategic goals.
