A leading EPC (Engineering, Procurement & Construction) company with 2,000+ employees and contractors across 18 active project sites was facing serious challenges in tracking attendance and presence on ground. Site teams were spread across cities, industrial clusters, and remote project locations, with different contractors managing their own rosters. Manual registers, Excel sheets, and basic biometric devices led to inconsistent data, proxy attendance, and frequent payroll disputes. The company partnered with Phi EDGE HRMS, a solution built for HR by HR practitioners, to standardize attendance, implement geo-fencing, and gain real-time visibility across all locations.
The attendance and site visibility challenge
Before implementation, attendance processes varied site-to-site: some used paper registers, others used isolated biometric devices with no central integration, and a few relied on contractor-submitted spreadsheets. This created multiple issues. First, HO and HR had no real-time view of who actually reported on-site, making deployment, billing, and client reporting difficult. Second, false attendance and buddy punching were common, especially in high-footfall or contractor-heavy sites, impacting labour costs and productivity. Third, consolidation of attendance for payroll took days at month-end, as data had to be manually verified and matched with shift rosters, leading to frequent grievances from workers and supervisors.
The EPC leadership wanted a unified system that could work across fixed offices, large construction sites, and temporary project locations, while supporting mobile-based punching and location control without expensive hardware at every point.
Why the EPC company chose Phi EDGE HRMS
During evaluation, the company was looking for three things: strong attendance and time tracking capabilities, reliable geo-fencing for multiple sites, and seamless integration with leave and payroll. Phi EDGE’s Leave & Attendance Management and Employee Time Tracking modules met these requirements, offering biometric, web, and mobile-based options with GPS and geo-fencing support for distributed workforces.
The “for HR by HR” approach reassured the CHRO and site HR teams that the implementation would factor in real-world scenarios like contractor workforce, rotating shifts, remote locations, sudden site mobilization, and compliance documentation. Leadership also valued that Phi EDGE HRMS is an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified company, ensuring that sensitive employee, location, and time data from multiple project sites would be secured and governed under robust information security standards.
Implementing attendance and geo-fencing across multiple sites
The rollout was planned in phases, starting with three high-priority project sites and the head office, then extending to other locations. HR and operations worked with Phi EDGE to map all sites, sub-locations, and entry/exit points, and to define shift patterns, grace periods, and contractor-specific rules.
Geo-fences were created around each approved site boundary so that employees and contractors could mark attendance only when physically present within the designated radius using the mobile app. Each punch carried both time and location coordinates, preventing off-site or fraudulent check-ins. For sites with existing biometric devices, data was integrated into Phi EDGE HRMS so that HO could still see a single consolidated view of attendance across all locations.
Supervisors and site admins were given role-based access to monitor daily in–out status, late arrivals, absences, and overtime for their respective sites. Central HR could see this information across all projects, allowing better manpower allocation when one site was overstaffed and another was short.
Turning raw attendance into reliable payroll and insights
Once attendance stabilized, the company linked the data directly with leave management and payroll inside Phi EDGE. Approved time and attendance data flowed into payroll calculations, automatically accounting for shifts, overtime rules, weekly offs, and unpaid leave. This significantly reduced manual adjustments and last-minute queries during salary processing.
Analytics dashboards provided views by site, contractor, role, and project—highlighting chronic latecomers, high-absence zones, and differences between planned vs actual deployment. Project managers began using these reports in review meetings to discuss productivity, safety compliance (based on presence at toolbox talks), and contractor performance. HR finally had credible, standardized records to support audits, client reports, and statutory compliance.
Measurable impact for the EPC client
Within six to nine months, the EPC company reported clear improvements. Payroll discrepancies related to attendance dropped noticeably, as both employees and contractors could see their records through self-service and had a defined workflow for corrections. Incidents of buddy punching and off-site marking reduced sharply due to geo-fencing and GPS-backed logs. Month-end consolidation time for attendance and overtime reduced from several days to a streamlined, system-driven process.
Leadership gained confidence in deployment numbers shared with clients, as attendance at each site could now be validated digitally rather than through manual tallies. HR and project teams described the shift as moving “from assumptions to evidence” when it came to on-site presence and cost control.
By combining domain-led design, robust attendance and geo-fencing capabilities, and a secure, ISO-certified HRMS backbone, Phi EDGE enabled this EPC company to standardize attendance across multiple sites, control leakage, and build a reliable foundation for workforce planning and payroll accuracy—delivered truly by HR, for HR, and for every site on the ground
