Paper HR to fully digital, across a mine site
Client & context
A remote mining operation in Eritrea, running a large workforce on rotation across a site far from any administrative centre.
We delivered this engagement onsite rather than remotely, which mattered: a great deal of what was broken only becomes visible standing in the room where the paperwork piles up.
Client named on request during a call. Permission to publish has not been sought.
The problem
Every HR process ran on paper. Flight bookings, time and attendance, timesheets, medical bookings, accommodation, transport, catering, surveys, health and safety records, leave and labour budgeting — all of it on forms that had to physically travel.
Requests went missing. Approvals could not be traced. Nobody could answer who approved what, or when, without searching a filing room.
What we built
- A single system covering every HR process end to end, from initial request through to implementation.
- Digital request and approval flows for flights, leave, transport, accommodation and catering.
- Time and attendance capture feeding directly into timesheets and labour budgeting.
- Medical booking management, induction and health and safety records.
- Survey tooling for workforce feedback.
Technical approach
We mapped each paper process before replacing it, rather than digitising the form and preserving the bottleneck.
Approval chains were modelled explicitly so every decision carries an owner and a timestamp.
The system was built to work over an unreliable connection, because the site has one.
Results
- No lost paperwork — every request exists as a record rather than a sheet of paper in transit.
- Approvals are digital and traceable end to end.
- Labour budgeting draws on the same data as time capture, so the two cannot disagree.
Technologies
- Custom web application
- Relational database
- Role-based access control
- Offline-tolerant data capture
Considering something similar?
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