How HeadChannel Built an HR System for an International Metals Trader

The client trades metals around the world and manages its staff from its headquarters in London. It ran salaries, bonuses and pension schemes on Excel spreadsheets, which made sense while the company was small.

The Challenge

As the company grew, the spreadsheets held it back.

• Inconsistent. Each sheet followed the layout of whoever built it. The pension sheet named staff differently from the salary sheet, so the two couldn't be matched automatically, and inconsistent pension calculations had left duplicated columns.
• Hard to scale. New columns were added to track the history of staff data, and the sheets grew harder to read and analyse.
• Hard to secure. Excel couldn't restrict access to some people and not others. Staff data had to stay private, yet every salary had to be agreed with the employee's line manager, which made setting salaries slow.

The Approach

The new system had to be a web app that offices around the world could reach, secured with two-factor authentication, full database encryption, a VPN and encrypted reports. It also had to drill down by office and department, show local currencies alongside sterling, export to XLSX and PDF, work well on iPads and track the history of the data.

HeadChannel analysed the input data, recommended one system with equal access for every office, and built interactive mock-ups so the client could see how it would work before development began. The system has four parts:

• Employee list. Current and former staff, with basic details, basic and proposed salaries, proposed bonuses, and a pension scheme chosen from a set list.
• Summary. How the budget is being used, with drill-down.
• Reports. Generated and encrypted on demand.
• Settings. Offices, departments, currencies and financial years.

Development took about two months in Scrum, on ASP.NET Core, Angular and MS SQL. The hardest part was migrating historical data held in inconsistent formats. A specialised mapping service let the team re-import it, which paid off when an updated set of spreadsheets arrived near the end of the project.

The Outcome

HeadChannel delivered on time, within three months and across the Christmas break. Staff management is now more efficient and reliable, and the client spends its time on the business rather than on administration.