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Manpower Trimming Strategy at Wipro: Replacing Human Employees with Software Robots
EXCERPTS
WIPRO’S PUSH TOWARD AUTOMATION
In 2014, the HR management at Wipro decided to take the radical decision of pruning its workforce to maintain its profit margins. In 2014, there were 146,000 employees on Wipro’s direct payroll In the areas of software testing and maintenance of computer infrastructure, Wipro employed 48,000 of these employees , which worked out to roughly one/fifth of its total employee strength. Likewise, in the admin department, Wipro had approximately 20,000 employees as of December 2014. Engineers working in the software testing and the maintenance department were involved in largely routine activities which required very basic technical skills. Similarly, the admin staff was also involved in simple repetitive tasks such as the front-office helpline, customer calling, after-sales service, etc. In a bid to maintain its profit margins, Wipro, like other leading IT companies in India, resorted to the services of IPCenter, a software platform which could monitor and automate the functioning of IT infrastructure... |
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SELECT SERVICES DELIVERED BY WIPRO’S FIXOMATIC
This service from FixOmaticTM helped in providing customers one-click solutions to a range of troubleshooting issues. The solutions were highly context sensitive and adaptive in nature, and the response time was typically within the space of a few seconds...
ACTIONS TAKEN BY COMPETITOR FIRMS
In the meantime, Wipro’s competitor firms had also geared up to the possibility of automation. Big names such as Infosys had partnered with IPSoft to automate its operations by the end of 2014 and IBM had already developed its AI-based supercomputer Watson which had demonstrated its skills at outperforming humans in tasks associated with rapid decision...
THE OTHER SIDE OF AUTOMATION
For employees, the major concern in the wake of such trends was the most obvious one – the security of their own jobs. Some analysts felt that predictions for the upcoming decade did not augur well for employees and job-seekers...
WIPRO’S MANPOWER TRIMMING CHALLENGE
The challenge for the HR managers at Wipro was not whether to go in for automation or continue with human workers for middle skill jobs such as system maintenance and administration tasks. It was evident to them that to sustain profitability in future, they had no choice but to go in for the retrenchment of the excess workforce and replace them with custom automation solution...
EXHIBITS
Exhibit I : Employee Expenses at Wipro
Exhibit II : Individual Salary Figures for Wipro Employees as updated on March 02, 2015
Exhibit III : Annual Supply of Industrial robots 2012-2013 and Forecast for 2014-2017
Exhibit IV : Country-wise shipment of Robots by 2017
Exhibit V : Different Automation Solutions on Offer
Exhibit VI : Probability of Traditional Job Losses due to Computerization by 2033
