The Information Systems team show us how more diversity leads to great results
Our Information Systems colleagues discovered that diversity and inclusion can be an enabler. They stepped into a partnership with Autimatic, an external partner that offers job opportunities to people with autism. If we are willing to go beyond borders when it comes to recruitment and where we look for talent, magic can happen!
Over the last six months, we have successfully undertaken two projects in partnership with Autimatic. Batist Huygebaert, from the Autimatic team, is assisting with implementation & support of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) projects: “RPA is a technology to automate high-volume, repetitive office tasks”. Wim Van Herck, Senior Project Manager at Umicore believes that implementing an RPA project requires a lot of precise manual work, which is where we see amazing synergy with our colleagues from Autimatic: “After the success of the first project, we decided to onboard a second Autimatic colleague, Stijn Vanpoucke. He was helping us out with classifying suspicious emails, covering the critical topic of cyber security at Umicore by making colleagues more aware of it.”
Geert Pauwels from Autimatic believes in the value of such a partnership, not only when it comes to the project but also to build team spirit and inclusion.
“We regularly see that people on the spectrum are very welcome and valuable in different teams as they often help to solve certain bottlenecks and like to do tasks that others for instance dislike. They often perform better on repetitive tasks that require a lot of sustained focus and accuracy. Our employees feel welcome and value being part of the teams of both companies which leads to higher retention.”
Geert Pauwels
Wim Schmitz, Business Analyst at Umicore was glad to have Batist from Autimatic in the team. “We are all facing the war for talent and we were looking for the right balance between creativity, innovation, and stability within this project. Batist brought all that into the mix which allowed us to get one big step further in our road to a performant and stable RPA Center of Excellence.”
Batist Huygebaert has always enjoyed working with computers, however, sometimes he struggled to find the right environment to stay concentrated. Finding a place where he could be himself and work comfortably allowed him to share his talent: “In this setup, working from home and with fixed regular alignments to ask questions, I really feel like I can share my talents to the fullest.”
