Welcome to the communities Dominika. Someone will I hope, answer this better than myself.

For me e-HR is extremely broad covering records, transactions, processes communication, documents etc. Automation relates to transactions and processes.

In reply to Ray:

Thank you for your answer to my question.

Good Question: We deals with HR AI solutions and how we see it as E HR as an end to end platform related to HR and Employee Life Cycle. Whereas, automation is related to processes such as RPA which can be used in both in HR and outside of HR

Automation is the delegation of routine tasks to algorithmic processes. It doesn't, actually, require a computer as a human is perfectly capable of mindlessly applying instructions to a task, and we've been doing it for years in the worse HR departments of the world.

For example "anyone with a Bradford Factor score in excess of 150 receives a formal warning" is automation. It applies an automatic output to a predetermined input.

Automation is enhanced by the use of digital support but doesn't rely upon it.

eHRM, meanwhile, cannot occur in the absence of digital support and refers to the externalization of HR records and processes to digital platforms. So the movement of personnel records out of a filing cabinet and into - via a scanner - a cloud storage platform is eHRM. The elimination of paper "holiday request" forms and replacement with an app-based holiday request and tracking system is eHRM.

eHRM doesn't involve automation. Decision making remains the purview of human actors. But information provision improves. So, for example, a person can submit a holiday request with a live view of the holiday plans of the rest of their team. Their manager can approve or reject the request with the same information, *and* with immediate sight of the applicant's holiday history, remaining days, absence record and current project deadlines.

In theory, eHRM makes decision making better by providing decision makers with easier access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

In practice, though, it can also overload decision makers and create a culture in which decision can *only* be taken once perfect knowledge it obtained, eliminating intuition and simple guesswork from the process. Objectively, this sounds like a good thing but it can end up delaying or dragging out decision making where information is less than perfect.

Automation, meanwhile, isn't automatically a bad thing. It can improve consistency and, if algorithms are well composed, ensure that policy and process are applied fairly to all. This can help to overcome bias and promote diversity, improving general productivity. It can also streamline decision-making (see eHRM above) by providing "default" answers to subordinate issues, leaving humans to make conclusive decisions. For example, an automated system might point out that a person's holiday request would normally be rejected because it clashes with another employee's absence in the same team and the requestor has a deadline that falls within the requested holiday period. But the decision maker can use their human intelligence to know that the project is ahead of schedule, and the requestor will need a break, so it is safe to approve the holiday.

Anyway, I hope that clarifies the distinction.

TL;DR

Automation - decision-making by algorithm; doesn't require a computer
eHRM - movement of procedures and administration to digital platform; requires a computer

In reply to Robey:

Thank you for your explanation. It helped me a lot.

In reply to Aiysha Sheikh:

Thank you for your explanation.