Automation's positive impact on jobs at Oxigen

The first level of automation at Oxigen was of its business platform itself. The money flow chain for trade advance & new retail acquisition was completely automated and that is the reason the company has been able to create 200,000 touch points pan India with retailers. Being a virtual company, Oxigen has been able to penetrate the market despite having a small workforce size when it began and today has accumulated a customer base of 150 million users.

Oxigen is a financial technology company but it started as a payment solution provider where the processes were fairly manual. The company treaded the path of automating its back-end processes and has been working towards removing manual dependency to increase efficiency. As the organization evolved, it has focused mainly on automating and standardizing processes that were manual in nature.

Here are some of the back-end processes the company has automated and the impact that this transition has had on the workforce and the business.

The analog way

Before adopting technology, when a retailer would sign up, the sales representative would visit the retail outlet and fill a KYC document for the company; and after filling the agreement, the retailer would receive a point of sale device alongside a trading advance. This transaction was very physical in nature. It was then followed up by collection of letters by the sales representative in the field, enclosing them in envelopes and sending couriers to the head office.  The data would then be punched manually into a system, and would then get populated onto a portal from where we could manage the retailer’s lifecycle. 

The digital way

The technology was introduced for this process. The sales representatives would now be required to go and deploy the service, instead of collecting the Retail Outlet Enrollment (ROE) form. All that is needed is sending the location pin which Oxigen verifies. The details of the retailer can be filled in via a mobile app, including upload of the necessary documentation. This facilitates instant on-boarding.

Impact

The first major impact was that the sales representative could do what was supposed to be his real job, i.e. acquisition of retailers. The sales representatives weren’t stripped of their responsibilities, their role just became more focused and the productivity increased. The formalization of the retailer’s acquisition, which would earlier take a month due to all the paperwork became a matter of few days.

The analog way

When a retailer takes any service from us, there is a commission that is attached to the service. In the analog way of operation, we would pay the commission in the subsequent month, and this also involved keeping a record of the transactions followed by a dialogue between the finance department and the retailers every month on what is the correct commission.

The digital way

Now the retailer is both selling and earning instantly. Instead of paying the commission at the end of the month’s cycle, the commission gets adjusted instantly when the payment is made by the customer. The amount that comes to Oxigen and the retailer’s commission is split automatically.

Impact

The instant impact of this has been the simplification of calculating commissions, record keeping and it has essentially optimized the retailer’s cash rotation. This has also eliminated any scope of discrepancy and avoids large manual accounting processes by the finance department for micro payment reconciliation. Since, Oxigen has a minimum of 50 million transactions monthly, it is hugely beneficial with this automation. 

The analog way

How revenue assurance works is that we buy inventory from partners like stock exchange on a daily basis, then we push this to the retail network. When this inventory is purchased, the operator is paid an X amount, and the consumption of this inventory is dynamic in nature. Sometimes stocks are left unutilized, and it is the job of the revenue management team to ensure that the appropriate inventory is bought, the stock is maintained appropriately, and if there is shortage on stock, it is refilled correctly. They also coordinate with the bank to ensure that the money is going back to the retail source. 

The digital way

Multiple levels of these interactions have been automated and the system does most of the work that employees were doing.

Impact

This has reduced the team size of the revenue management team from 12 people to 6. And the 6 people who became redundant in the revenue management team have now been involved in doing data mining for making customer profiles & on devising ways to optimize the stock by analyzing the user consumption data. 

There have been no redundancies and cases of outplacement from Oxigen due to automation till date. In fact, automation of processes has simply improved our efficiency, made us agile and helped us make a more efficient use of our manpower. The employees have been deployed to do quality strategic tasks which have had a direct impact to our revenue. 

The sales team’s roles have been streamlined as they are focusing majorly on retail acquisition. The redundant activity of packaging, sending couriers, following up with the services has been taken care of. In fact, the sales team size has only increased as we have become focused on customer acquisition. Introduction of automation in revenue management processes allowed Oxigen to create a new team which could indulge in Data Analytics and be advisors to the business on stocks that are or not to be purchased and the stocks that are to be returned. This team advises Oxigen on how to optimize cash flows and also help position and upsell new product lines.

When we look at redefining the role of some people in the revenue management team, the objective was to deploy them in a more strategic role. And the redefinition of their role was in accordance to the skills they already had, i.e. a deep understanding of finance and data, the process of purchasing inventory and consumption of the inventory. Since they already knew how the system works, all that was required by HR was to facilitate training on inventory management and optimization. All it took was a simple one hour session which was done with them internally. It was a plug n play kind of role for them. 

The next step for us in this automation journey would be to indulge in Big Data Analytics. We have set up a team to engage in the analytics and are now starting to profile retailers, the clientele the retailers get, information about the consumer and their consumption of services. Such data will help us know what consumer preferences are – whether railway tickets, mobile recharge, wallet top-ups, banking services etc. Such insights will help Oxigen to personalize the way each retail outlet looks – all based on the analysis of data we have at hand. We don’t see automation strategy impacting job-creation at Oxigen or lead to redundancies. It will only make people efficient at work. 

(As told to Vikas Arora)