Case Study

Lucas Indian Service Ltd is a closely held public limited company with a 150 year track record belonging to South India's one of the largest industrial house belonging to TVS. Lucas after detailed evaluation of various consultants chose to engage Crystal HR team as its consultant to implement Wallet-HR Lucas is a service organisation and has its own automotive battery manufacturing units as well. It has branches spread over 50 locations all over India totalling around 700 employees. Lucas Finance and HR department was finding it difficult to manage its employee related attendance and payouts. Preparation of attendance data for payroll use to take a long time and specific manpower was spent in just collating the data from different branches.

To add to this HR was not able to rely on its accuracy. Information on late, permissions, hours spent in office and on-duty was literally not available. Mr. Suresh, CFO of Lucas discussed this difficulty with Crystal HR team and solution was agreed upon as suggested by Crystal HR team to implement Wallet-HR. As a first step biometric devices were installed in all the locations and connected to the central server at Chennai. In the first phase 15 locations were connected and the software implemented. Based on the experience from the 15 locations, remaining locations were implemented at one go.

This being the first experience for the HR team to automate attendance, there were quite a few hiccups and with the solid backing of the management and commitment from Crystal HR team, all the issues were sorted out one after the other. Within two months the system was streamlined and there was comfort at all levels. With the system implemented, daily mails were going to all the employees about their late coming, early goings, single punch and no-punch while in office. Through the portal these were rectified by the employees with due approvals by the respective managers. HR was able to see the unapproved leaves during the payroll period and was able to forward such leaves to suitable persons for approval before payroll. The finance and HR team were able to view the complete organization attendance instantly which was a dream before implementing the Wallet HR’s attendance system. Having achieved all this, the only step that was required by HR was to click a menu that would send the required attendance data for payroll. Once this was achieved, the finance team moved to implement Travel, Conveyance, Reimbursements and Capex modules. Each of the modules was integrated to attendance since attendance holds the key for claims. Conveyance claim will not be allowed without on-duty approval and on-duty record in leave would be created automatically on approval of travel plan. No new travel plan would be allowed without settling the previous two travel claims. This has resulted in huge savings in advance amount which the employees would claim in the manual system.

Before the implementation of claims related modules, all the claims were processed manually and paid at the branch level which was prone to manual errors in respect of eligible limits and the claim amount. After the introduction of the claim systems, the management was very happy to see the reduction in claim value and the settlement was happening faster. This has resulted in saving lakhs of rupees which earned the appreciation from the President of the company. To achieve tighter integration of data from the stage of recruitment, it was decided by the President to automate recruitment process. All the stake holders – Candidate, placement agencies, verification agencies -- in the recruitment process were given login options in addition to the workflow within the organisation hierarchy. Since the recruitment process is integrated to payroll, fitment details were available in recruitment from the payroll data before issuing the offer letter to the candidate. On selection of the candidate, he would enter all the required data and provide necessary attachments like experience letter, relieving letter, photograph, etc through his login before joining the organisation. Email would be triggered to HR and IT department about the joining details of the candidate a day before. On joining, the master data and all the related attachments would be moved to payroll by just providing the physical date of joining. As a next step it was decided by the President of the company to automate sales reporting. A system was developed integrating with Travel. Travel plan cannot be entered by an employee without mentioning the objectives of visit in the daily reporting system.

Travel claims will not be allowed without completing the daily reporting system. Going by the latest technology, it was decided by the President to move the application to Tablet enabled. All the sales people were given Android Tablet where the daily reports would be entered.

Conclusion- After integrating various employee centric modules, the management was able to bring in discipline, control the expenses and more importantly able to credit the employees' account without any delay. All this would not have been possible without REAL integration of modules.

SAP integration - At all levels wherever an accounting entry needs to passed, it was automated to post the JV to SAP to ensure that there was no manual intervention in the accounting system.