Launching a Labour Management System Application
Delivered a new labour management application that captures and tracks workforce productivity; via integration with any upstream system along with manual entry for off-system operations.
The Context
Situation
There are more than 50 warehouses where an in-house Warehouse Management System application is deployed for more than 80 B2B customers. The daily productivity for operations workforce employed in these warehouses is tracked using a third-party application in which the individual resources have to enter their task timings manually. This results in inaccurate billing to customers and incorrect payments to workers; increasing monetary and legal liabilities.
The Approach
Insight
Stakeholder discussions across Operations, Warehouse Management, HR, Finance/Billing, and Client Services surfaced major pain points in the existing LMS: workers lost time on manual data entry, managers lacked real-time visibility into floor activity, HR couldn't track attendance or hours, and Finance received inaccurate time-sheets - causing under-billing, salary discrepancies, and legal exposure. Productivity tracking was inconsistent, lacked automated feedback loops, and had no integration with other organisational systems, while also adding licensing costs. These findings justified building a new, in-house LMS via the GCC - one that integrates with existing applications and doubles as a new product offering.
Goals
- Build a new LMS product that can be integrated with the in-house WMS to get operational tasks data, thereby removing the need for manual data entry by workers
- Provide real-time visibility of worker task assignment to warehouse supervisors
- Integrate with HR management system used in the organisation to capture worker attendance and actual working hours
- Generate accurate, system driven time-sheets that can be used by the Finance team to bill clients and pay the workers
- Implement the product across all warehouses to streamline capturing of workforce productivity
- Build application driven feedback loops with multi-tiered approvers to remove any discrepancies in the time-sheets
- Extend the capability of the product further to enable workforce planning and forecasting
Navigation
Led end-to-end product development after discovery across Operations, Warehouse, HR, Finance, and Client Services revealed critical gaps: manual data entry, zero supervisor visibility, no HR attendance tracking, and inaccurate time-sheets causing client under-billing and wage-dispute risk. Built the case to replace the costly third-party tool with an in-house build.
MVP (10 warehouses, 2 clients): Core user/order/task management, deep WMS integration, event-driven engine auto-generating time-sheets.
V1.0 (+10 warehouses, 3 clients, scaled org-wide): Off-system task support, full RBAC with config UI, two-tier approval workflow - driving 50/50 adoption across automated and manual tasks.
Phase 3 (ongoing): HRMS integration for roles, RBAC, and badge-based shift accuracy; role-based dashboards; feedback-enhanced approvals.
Roadmap: Automated billing, full labour law compliant Labour Management module, AI-driven planning.
The Results
Achievement
Through the launch of this product, the operations teams in the warehouses went from frustrated to empowered due the removal of manual data entry for tasks done using the in-house WMS and accurate accounting of their daily work hours. The warehouse supervisors and the finance billing team got liberated of time consuming approval loops existing outside the system. The organisation was able to sunset an old application while saving costs.
Learnings
Phased rollouts beat big-bang replacements - shipping a lean MVP around the single highest friction problem (manual data entry) earned early trust before layering in complexity like RBAC and approvals. Just as important: real-world operations rarely fit "system of record" assumptions cleanly. The 50/50 split between WMS-driven and manually logged tasks in V1.0 proved that off-system exceptions had to be designed as a first-class use case, not an afterthought - a lesson that shaped every phase after.