A specialist UK recruitment operation with ~60 HQ staff and 800+ field staff was running its HR and compliance functions across eight disconnected systems, including spreadsheets used as databases. Nobody had an HRIS. The audit found why; the migration fixed it.
Diagram showing 8 disconnected HR systems consolidated into 1 unified HRIS, with £24,520/year licence savings and 14 hours/week per worker recovered.
Compliance officers were copying the same onboarding data into four different places. Manually. Every time. And still not trusting any of them.
The operation was running an ATS, a job ad manager, an employee directory, a social media workforce tool, a payroll system, and several forms platforms. Plus spreadsheets: multiple spreadsheets used as the actual database for things that needed a real system. None of these tools were connected to each other. Onboarding status lived in all of them simultaneously, or in none of them reliably.
The compliance team had built a workaround: when they needed to report on where a new starter was in the onboarding process, they’d pull from multiple systems and re-enter the data onto a master spreadsheet. That spreadsheet existed in up to four versions. The report was only as good as whoever had done the last update. HR had no dedicated system at all. Everything was manual, nothing had an audit trail.
The organisation was paying £4,992/month across three main tools. Not because it needed that many tools, but because the tools had been bought to solve specific problems and nobody had looked at the overall picture. The cost wasn’t even the worst part. The time was.
The engagement started with a cross-departmental audit of Recruitment, Compliance, and HR. The goal wasn’t to build a list of tools. The tool list was obvious. The goal was to map how data actually moved between the teams and where the manual work was introduced. That mapping exercise produced the finding that compliance officers were replicating data in up to four different locations just to report on onboarding status.
With the map complete, the case for a single HRIS was straightforward. A 25-slide business case was authored: current state, proposed state, cost comparison, migration plan, risk register, and projected outcomes. The recommendation was to consolidate onto a single platform sized for ~1,070 users, replacing the fragmented stack at a lower monthly cost with significantly higher coverage.
Once approved, the migration was owned end-to-end: data cleaning and standardisation, internal champions identified in each department, training plans built and delivered, and data entry guidelines written so the new system wouldn’t drift back into the same mess within six months. Change management isn’t a nice-to-have on a project like this. It’s the part that makes it stick.
Full inventory of all eight systems: how data entered each one, how it moved between them, where it was duplicated, and where it fell off the edge. Every manual hand-off documented, every spreadsheet-as-database identified.
A full business case for the recommended consolidation: current vs proposed cost comparison, migration plan, risk register, and projected outcomes. Written for a non-technical approver, precise enough to act on without re-scoping.
Data cleaning, standardisation, and migration to the new platform for ~1,070 users across Recruitment, Compliance, and HR. Internal champions identified per department. Training plans built and delivered. Standardised data entry guidelines written so the clean state doesn’t decay.
Saved per year on licences: £4,992/mo down to £2,948/mo for ~1,070 users, documented
Recovered per worker from killing the manual data re-entry cycle across Compliance, Recruitment, and HR
Disconnected systems replaced by a single unified platform. ~1,070 users migrated with full audit trail
When compliance officers are manually copying data between four spreadsheets, it’s easy to frame that as a people problem or a training problem. It’s neither. It’s what happens when there’s no system that covers what they actually need to do. The spreadsheets exist because the legitimate tools don’t talk to each other. The manual work exists because the alternative (trusting data that’s in four inconsistent places) is worse. People aren’t slow. Their systems are.
The other thing this case taught: change management isn’t optional on a migration. The technical work (data cleaning, importing, configuring) is the easy half. The hard half is getting three departments with different habits and different mental models to use one system consistently. Internal champions, clear guidelines, and a training plan aren’t project overhead. They’re what determines whether the investment holds six months later.
If your team is spending hours on work that shouldn’t exist (copying data between tools, maintaining spreadsheets that should be a system), have a chat with us. Costs nothing, no pitch, and we’ll tell you straight what a closer look would actually find.
or ring us on 07754 218 688 any weekday