What is the difference between process automation and process orchestration in HR?

Research published by LinkedIn Learning reveals that 82% of business leaders believe the HR function now plays a more critical role than ever before. In recent years, HR teams have had to tackle a wide array of new challenges, including navigating an increasingly competitive labour market and helping their organisations manage the shift to hybrid working.

To cope with these and many other responsibilities, a much greater focus on HR automation and process orchestration in HR is essential. But one recent Gartner survey shows that only 35% of HR leaders feel confident that their current technology strategy is helping them to reach their objectives.

So, how can CHROs and HR Directors use digital tools to achieve functional excellence?
Embracing HR automation and process orchestration provides powerful, interrelated solutions that can streamline and optimise HR operations, helping to drive efficiency and productivity, enhance the employee experience and support data-driven strategic workforce planning.

How Process Orchestration Transforms Workforce Planning

Only 35% of HR leaders feel confident that their current technology strategy is helping them to reach their objectives.*

*Source: Gartner research

What is HR automation?

Put simply, automation is the use of technology to execute repetitive, rules-based tasks with minimal human intervention. Because manual processes are one of the biggest frustrations for HR teams, taking up huge amounts of time (hampering productivity and reducing strategic impact);, automation is especially valuable by streamlining workflows and helping to accelerate specific processes at each stage of the employee lifecycle.

For example, automation in recruitment and onboarding can significantly reduce this manual workload and improve efficiency. It can automatically route application documents to hiring managers, streamline position approval workflows, create employee files as soon as an offer is made and ensure IT equipment is ready for a new hire’s first day. By minimising repetitive administrative tasks, HR teams can focus more on strategic initiatives and delivering a great employee experience.

What is HR process orchestration?

HR process orchestration goes beyond simple automation. It focuses on managing the flow and interconnection of HR processes, data, tools and teams — ensuring that workflows occur in the right sequence and that critical information is seamlessly shared across systems.

In the case of onboarding, for example, you can tie together a sequence of automated steps into a structured, streamlined process with visibility into the entire process from one easy-to-use dashboard. It could start with sending forms and providing information on corporate culture and objectives to new hires, before requesting software licenses and equipment from IT, then creating new employee profiles in HRIS, payroll, benefits and performance management systems.

Process orchestration forms the basis for greater standardisation and more scalable HR operations.

It’s built by integrating three technology layers:

Core systems that store employee data
Applications for managing specific HR processes
User interfaces that enable HR and employees to access and analyse the data

By bringing these elements together, process orchestration transforms HR operations – making workflows more efficient, scalable and responsive to business needs.

How investing in a workplace experience platform can empower your people

What are the key differences between HR automation and process orchestration?

While HR automation and process orchestration complement one another, and deliver optimum results when deployed together, there are differences in terms of scale, objectives and complexity.

Category	Automation	Orchestration
Focus	Streamlines individual HR tasks	Integrates multiple tasks and processes
Scale	Simplifies routine administrative work within a single HR process	Coordinates processes spanning different HR teams and locations
Purpose	Reduces the need for human intervention in tasks	Creates end-to-end workflows aligned with wider HR objectives
Insights	Insight into a specific task	Holistic view of processes and actions

The key difference between HR automation and process orchestration is that automation streamlines individual HR tasks, while process orchestration integrates multiple HR workflows to align with strategic goals, such as improving talent attraction and retention.

What is the strategic impact of HR process orchestration?

As HR workloads continue to increase and pressure mounts to achieve more with less, adopting HR process orchestration will help to boost agility, efficiency and operational performance. Streamlined, automated HR workflows will help to reduce the administrative burden, ensuring HR teams can adapt quickly to evolving challenges and focus more time on strategic HR transformation.

In addition, orchestration allows HR to leverage data for strategic decisions, by enabling teams to create custom-built reports that pull information from different systems. For instance, integrated data on employee turnover, workforce demographics and headcount generated by HR process orchestration tools can be used to uncover insights into workforce trends and skills gaps, and to tailor talent acquisition and management policies to build long-term organisational success. The ability to access user-friendly self-service frameworks will also enhance the employee experience during many touchpoints, helping to increase retention rates.

Within Ricoh, we took this approach. We built a new self-service platform, which offers employees across the EMEA region access to HR information, performance and learning systems, an onboarding portal and much more. As a result, process orchestration is helping to inspire belonging and foster a collaborative culture in our business.