Digital Transformation through Innovative Use of Computer Vision Technologies
Global leaders across organizations had set out into the unchartered waters post-pandemic and welcomed the new remote and hybrid models of working. With this change also came challenges around employee safety and productivity. To put an end to the problem of productivity and data security concerns, Tech Mahindra developed a computer-vision-powered monitoring solution to track and improve productivity and secure data remotely.
In fact, experts from our technology vertical Sagar Paul, Business Lead (KORNEA) and RPA Business Lead (BPS), Tech Mahindra; Vaibhav Dalal, Product Head (KORNEA) and CAI Business Lead (BPS), Tech Mahindra; Imran Momin, Head of AI Products, Tech Mahindra; and Riana Smit, Customer Services Lead for Automation, Tech Mahindra, came together for a live Tech Talk session to discuss how KORNEA – Tech Mahindra’s machine and employee monitoring solution – uses this technology to address remote work challenges.
- Enables efficient monitoring of employee productivity without putting their privacy at stake
- Serves as a preventive measure and helps in tightening security
- Features real-time reporting which enables better decision making for the operations teams
- A single tool with multiple work models
- Captures non-compliant activities, non-productive hours, but nothing that isn’t required or specified by clients. For example, employees’ personal information
- Gathers data that can be configured to both cloud and on-premises as directed by clients; we work with all cloud providers like Azure /GCP, AWS
Let’s deep dive further.
How Computer Vision Technology Aids in Employee and Machine Monitoring
Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computer systems to derive insightful information from digital images, videos, and other visual data. The computer vision technology enables human resource monitoring replacing the earlier ‘presence on desk’ criteria for companies that are switching to hybrid and remote work models.
Current Challenges in Remote and Hybrid Work Models
While employees are now experiencing a greater flexibility around their work and personal lifestyles, imbalance is inevitable when one flows into another. This has created a lack of transparency in terms of productive and non-productive hours, employees’ time utilization, and application usage.
Moreover, many organizations are also observing a work-from-anywhere setting, which makes monitoring and ensuring privacy of utmost importance, especially in the business process services (BPS) sector. Since presence on desk is no longer the criteria for human surveillance and machine monitoring, challenges like unauthorized access or people fiddling with your device in a non-work environment have become more common. A single mistake can put the organization at risk and hurt your brand’s reputation.
KORNEA for Automated Remote Employee and Machine Monitoring
While creating flexible work models is the need of the hour, employee monitoring has become ineluctable due to many factors. Additionally, employees’ trust and safety remain organizations’ top priority. Tech Mahindra has developed KORNEA to address remote worker productivity and safety problems. It is a plug and play solution to monitor employee login activity and applications aided with computer vision algorithms.
Monitoring Productivity While Safeguarding Privacy
KORNEA integrates with the webcam of the operator’s computer and monitors designated applications’ usage, putting transparency back into place. But employee monitoring tools like this can be viewed as intrusive and a threat to employees’ privacy. Therefore, our solution is designed on the principle of trust. It enables the implementors to gain visibility and insight into what data is captured and reported and to classify data as ‘productive’ and ‘non-productive’. KORNEA’s key functions when it comes to productivity monitoring are:
- Visibility on logged-in hours vs. productive hours
- In-built track and engagement feature for insights on the time spent on each activity
- Identification of behavior pattern
The solution is configured to be compliant from security and sensitive data capture standpoint. While capturing productivity information, all personal data is left out, so agents do not feel that their privacy is being threatened.
Securing Sensitive Data Remotely
After installation, the tool performs face scanning using deep neural network and caffe model. The image input is used to establish who the owner of the machine is. Then, every time a person logs in, the face image captured is compared with that of the owner to authorize access. And if a system cannot detect a face, the screen is automatically locked so the machine isn’t left unattended for anyone else to access it.
The tool can empower the operations team, especially the back-office team, by automatically capturing and classifying accurate data without the need for manually monitoring, reporting, and analyzing employee activity.
All the evidence of potential data threats or breaches are also available on the reporting portal for auditing purposes.
If you’d like to gain deeper insights into what KORNEA does to enable seamless employee monitoring and data security, you can access the session recording.
