Where did the hunel project start? What was the background?
Our previous HR system was first built in 2004, and after so many years in service the inefficiency of an aging system had become significant. Assignments and compensation management in particular took a great deal of time in simple repetitive work and verification. We could not fully trust what the system calculated, so we had to re-verify everything in spreadsheets each time. Managing salary tables for new hires and calculating incentives and retroactive pay took an especially heavy toll. On top of that, the structure was fragmented into some 2,000 menus and around 150 user groups, it was not integrated with our company ERP, and there were physical limits to reflecting changes in law and policy such as the 52-hour workweek in time. All of it kept adding to the workload on our staff.
What led you to decide that it was time to change?
HR was evolving toward 'Digital HR' and 'HR Analytics' built on AI and big data, while our legacy system stayed locked in an older structure. As the need grew for an employee self-service (ESS) environment where people could make decisions quickly and exchange feedback on mobile, we concluded that a fundamental rebuild, not another round of temporary maintenance, had become essential to the company's survival.
Among the many HR systems available, why did you choose hunel?
The first thing we verified was whether a system could reliably take on Daewoo E&C's vast HR processes and our company-wide ERP environment. Expertise in Korean labor and tax law was the decisive criterion for us. Whether a system could reflect constantly changing rules in time, such as the 52-hour workweek or flexible working arrangements that differ by site, had been our biggest headache. hunel had many cases of responding reliably to those changes in law and policy, and we confirmed that it could also deliver improvements effectively across each HR area, including compensation, benefits, and recruiting. Add to that a rich set of references for building HR systems at large enterprises, and we concluded that it met every one of our criteria.
| Before | After |
| Payroll and retroactive calculations re-verified by hand in spreadsheets, all-nighters at every payroll close | Automatic calculation · retroactive processing in the system stabilized payroll close, with overtime down more than 50% |
| Legacy structure scattered across some 2,000 menus · around 150 user groups | A systematically integrated HR system, managed far more efficiently |
| No dedicated module for employees at overseas sites, making workforce management difficult | A unified management framework that covers overseas site workers as well |
| Attendance · benefits requests and approvals handled on paper · by hand | Requests through mobile self-service and approvals on mobile, for two-way communication |
Were there difficulties you had not expected during the build?
Because the organization is so large, gathering business requirements and fixing the development scope in the early PI stage took considerable coordination on our side as well. Sorting out different requirements from each department and aligning priorities was not easy, but we found our direction by working through alternatives with HCG stage by stage.
What was your experience of HCG's customer support and HR expertise?
There are always minor issues after a system goes live. In the closing stage of the project, HCG ran technical training for our existing IT operators and prepared us through post-launch stabilization, and thanks to that the system settled into the company naturally, without much confusion. That close support did not stop at the technical side. Sensitive questions such as the legal validity of electronic employment contracts (electronic signatures) were something we kept needing to confirm, and I remember being helped to streamline our fixed-term workforce management process as we worked through other companies' cases and the legal risks together.
Looking back on the project, what change stands out most inside the company?
We can now give management accurate HR information and analytics for decision-making at the right time, and team leaders in the business and site managers are pleased that they can readily receive HR information about their own people according to their job and position permissions. What stands out most is that employees now request attendance · benefits on mobile and their managers approve on mobile, which has made two-way communication far smoother.
Many HR teams have used a legacy system for years, or are facing a large-scale build, but hesitate because of the cost and the burden of replacement. Which companies would you recommend hunel to, and what advice would you give them?
I would strongly recommend it to companies like ours: those with a legacy system that has aged 10 to 15 years or more, those worn down by manual compensation and payroll verification, and those moving to mobile-based Digital HR. HR solutions that handle vast accumulated data reliably while remaining flexible enough to scale are not easy to find.
That said, building or rebuilding an e-HR system takes a great deal of budget and people's time, so honestly the psychological pressure is heavy and you often run into resistance from the finance and strategy side. We went through that too. But to keep pace with a rapidly changing digital era, you have to act ahead. I think now is the cheapest it will ever be.
Finally, as a company that has been through it, what should teams pay the most attention to early on?
Gathering input from the people who do the work, and cleansing data for the migration, deserve the most effort. And above all, I hope you hold on to the conviction that you are building a forward-looking HR system, all the way through.
