What was the background behind the attendance management upgrade project?
Yuhan-Kimberly's office staff work a standard five-day week, while production staff run a four-group, two-shift rotation. For production staff, attendance was mostly handled on paper, so monthly closing took a lot of time. The process was to check leave and overtime requests on paper and cross-check them against the clock-in and clock-out system, and at the time of adoption, the 52-hour workweek was written into law, which added the burden of closing the books while staying compliant. On top of that, with Internet Explorer reaching end of service, moving to web standards became unavoidable, and we took that as the chance to replace paper forms with online and mobile.
What was the hardest part to solve along the way?
The hardest part was building logic that employees could use conveniently. In the design process of upgrading the system to fit our company, it took a lot of time to listen to employees' requirements and decide the menu tree and UI. Migrating data from the existing system was no small task either.
Among the many HR systems available, what made you decide to carry out the upgrade with hunel?
We had maintained a partnership with hunel for quite a long time, and even on the system before this upgrade we had completed the integration with Workday without any issue. So we decided to proceed with the system upgrade with hunel without much hesitation. We had no doubts about the solution itself, and a stable integration with Workday was the most important criterion of all.
| Before | After |
| Production-line attendance handled on paper, requiring manual cross-checking against the clock-in and clock-out system | Attendance requests such as leave and overtime handled on mobile, integrated automatically with the system |
| Dependent on Internet Explorer, not web-standard compliant | Moved to a web-standards basis, accessible with no browser or device constraints |
| Overtime request and work-confirmation forms delivered by hand between departments, or filled out by employees in person | Overtime and attendance requests handled on mobile, ending manual delivery and in-person completion |
| Benefits requests such as family-event allowances required a separate paperwork procedure | Benefits requests also handled easily on mobile |
Were there any unexpected hurdles as the project went on?
It went so smoothly that there was no particular unexpected difficulty that stands out. That said, we invested a lot of time in fully understanding each other's ground, such as our policies and our attendance and HR management, and we made sure the people in charge at our sites nationwide could take part from the development stage, so that even the finer details could all be reflected.
There were many technically demanding requirements, such as Workday integration and expanding SSO. How did you prepare for and handle these internally?
The integration with Workday was a particularly tough piece of work. Because we had experience integrating Workday on the existing system, in this upgrade too we organized the integration requirements clearly and passed them on. At that time, to strengthen system security, SSO (Single Sign On) needed to be introduced across every system being developed, so we set that standard systematically in advance and proceeded on that basis.
Looking back on this project, if you had to pick Yuhan-Kimberly's most satisfying decision?
Allocating the budget effectively and adopting the mobile service. Many companies are moving to mobile now, but at the time it was quite an early decision. With mobile, we let individuals see their own work records so they would not violate the 52-hour limit themselves, we did away with paper forms, and things like benefits requests became convenient. From our people, too, we received quite a lot of feedback that being able to request their own leave and attendance on mobile was really convenient.
For companies that have long used a legacy HR system, or are about to undertake a large-scale HR system build, which kinds of companies would you especially recommend hunel to?
You need a core need, that is, a concrete reason for adopting it. Yuhan-Kimberly set the end of Internet Explorer service, the need for an effective attendance system to respond to the 52-hour workweek, and improving the employee experience through mobile adoption as our main reasons and goals for adoption. Because we had clear goals, we were able to stay focused on the development.
Finally, as an early adopter that settled hunel in successfully, is there a tip people should be sure to take care of at the start of adoption?
I think the key is having enough of a pretesting period before the official launch. Before officially launching the finished system, we set aside about two weeks so that employees could use it themselves and report errors. Thanks to the errors found and fixed during this period, we were able to greatly reduce the initial confusion.
