"Full-Cycle HR Digitisation for a 1,200-Person Manufacturing Group Using a Custom HRMS"

Challenge

The client operated a manufacturing and distribution group with 1,200 employees across three production facilities, a central distribution hub, and a corporate head office. HR operations were entirely paper-based. Attendance was tracked via physical registers at each facility, submitted to head office by courier monthly, and manually entered into spreadsheets before payroll could be processed.

The payroll cycle took 9 working days: 6 to collect, consolidate, and verify attendance data across all sites, and 3 to calculate salaries, deductions, allowances, and overtime manually in Excel. Errors ran between 8% and 12% of employee records per month, requiring a correction cycle of 2 to 3 additional days before final disbursement. Total: 11 to 12 working days, more than half the working month, with a 2-person HR team almost entirely tied to this single process.

Leave management ran through paper forms routed from employees to line managers to facility coordinators to head office, with no real-time visibility into balances, no mechanism to prevent over-approval, and no financial leave liability figure available to finance.

Recruitment was managed through email and WhatsApp, with CVs stored in the HR Manager’s personal inbox. Time-to-hire for mid-level roles averaged 67 days. Compliance documentation — contracts, EOBI and PESSI filings — was stored in physical files with no digital backup and no audit trail. The group had budgeted two additional facilities within 18 months.

Arvixi built a custom HRMS across 13 modules mapped directly to the client’s workflows and Pakistan labour and social security compliance requirements: Employee Master with full digital profiles and document storage, Attendance and Time Tracking via biometric integration at all four sites, Leave Management with a self-service portal and line-manager approval workflows, Payroll Processing with automated salary calculation including grade-based pay scales, overtime, deductions, EOBI contributions, and PESSI filings, Recruitment and Applicant Tracking, Onboarding and Document Management, Performance Management, Training Records, Grievance Management, and a Compliance and Statutory Reporting module.

The biometric integration was the foundational unlock. Devices at each facility feed attendance data directly into the HRMS in real time, eliminating the physical register, the monthly courier, and the manual spreadsheet entry. Payroll now runs on data already in the system rather than on data that first has to be collected, transported, and verified.

The employee self-service portal allows staff to check leave balances, submit requests, view payslips, and update personal information from any device. Line managers approve leave and view team attendance through a mobile-accessible dashboard.

Compliance filings — EOBI and PESSI — are generated directly from the system in the formats required by each authority. Deployment ran across 16 weeks in phased rollout by module, with the two planned additional facilities onboarded onto the same platform within the 18-month growth window at no additional implementation cost.

• Monthly payroll processing time reduced from 11–12 working days to 2 working days, an 83% reduction

• Payroll error rate fell from 8–12% to under 1% in the first month of live operation

• Leave approval cycle reduced from an average of 9 days (paper route) to same-day for 94% of requests

• EOBI and PESSI compliance filings now generated directly from the system in the required formats

• Time-to-hire for mid-level roles reduced from 67 days to 31 days within the first quarter

• Two additional facilities onboarded onto the system within the 18-month plan at no additional implementation cost

Complete digital audit trail established; first external HR audit post-deployment completed with zero documentation gaps