What Does a Week of Rosters Look Like When Every Shift Is Typed by Hand?
It looks like a workforce manager staring at 650 names on a Friday evening, assigning next week's shifts one row at a time. That was the routine at Ayuda Solutions before the switch.
Pick an employee. Assign a shift. Save. Move to the next name. Repeat roughly 650 times.
Then a client calls on Monday asking for 40 more agents on the night queue. The roster that took hours to build now needs rebuilding, by hand, before the shift starts.
This is the story of how Ayuda stopped doing that.
Who Is Ayuda Solutions?
Ayuda Solutions Private Limited is a BPO with a 650-person workforce, where staffing the right number of agents on the right shift is the business itself. In a BPO, the roster is not an HR document. It is the delivery plan.
In this industry, client contracts revolve around service levels: calls answered, time taken, and queue handling. Not enough agents on a shift, and the service level goes down. Too many, and there is no margin.
Ayuda manages voice and non-voice processes, from customer service to back office work, for more than a dozen clients. That makes headcount planning a daily decision, not a monthly one, which is why Ayuda uses TankhaPay for headcount planning and daily manpower planning alongside its rosters.
Why Was Shift Planning Breaking at Ayuda?
Since each shift and each weekly day off had to be allocated individually to an employee, the process couldn’t operate any faster than the speed of client demands. The system worked efficiently with 50 employees; however, with 650 employees, it became a bottleneck.
Four issues were caused by the manual approach:
- Time. It took hundreds of clicks each week just to construct the complete roster for the week before making changes.
- Errors. One click too many and you've got an agent scheduled for the wrong shift, or you've made two people on one team have the same weekly day off.
- Slow reaction to demand. When a client process needed extra agents for a day, there was no quick way to move a group of people across shifts.
- No daily view of headcount. Without a planned-versus-available picture for each day, managers found gaps when the shift started, not before.
The cost was not only HR hours. Every rostering gap risked a missed service level on a client contract.
Why Did Ayuda Switch HRMS Vendors?
Ayuda already had an HRMS, and that was part of the frustration: the system was in place, but its interface and limited customisation meant the hardest job was still being done by hand.
Two issues drove the decision to switch. The first was the interface. Daily tasks took too many screens and too many clicks for supervisors who needed to act quickly during a shift.
The second was customisation. Ayuda's rostering logic is specific to how a BPO runs, and the previous platform could not be shaped around it. When a workflow did not fit, the team worked around the software instead.
Why Did Ayuda Choose TankhaPay?
Ayuda chose TankhaPay because the team was willing to build the one thing the previous system could not: Bulk roster management is shaped around how Ayuda actually plans shifts. Most of the other requirements were standard. That one was not.
Attendance, geofencing, approval workflows, and payroll are available across most HRMS platforms in India. What separated the options was whether a vendor would adapt the product to Ayuda's process or ask Ayuda to adapt to the product.
Having switched once over customisation, Ayuda was not going to switch into the same problem.
What does Ayuda run on TankhaPay?
Ayuda wanted one system where planning a shift, marking attendance against it, and paying for it all ran on the same data. The requirement list was long, but it was grouped into four jobs.
| Job | What Ayuda uses |
|---|---|
| Plan the workforce | Roster management, shift management, headcount planning and daily manpower planning |
| Assign at scale | Bulk roster assignment and bulk weekly-off marking, instead of one employee at a time |
| Control changes | Approval workflows with maker-checker, so no roster or attendance change goes live on one person's say-so |
| Capture and pay | Mobile attendance with geofencing, feeding directly into payroll |
The maker-checker requirement matters more than it looks. In a BPO, a roster change affects billing, overtime, and client coverage, so one person makes the change and a second person approves it.
How Does Bulk Roster Management Work at Ayuda?
Instead of assigning shifts employee by employee, Ayuda's managers now select a group, apply a shift and weekly off to all of them in one action, and send it for approval. What used to be hundreds of entries became a handful.
The new flow runs in four steps:
- Select a group. Managers filter employees by team, process, location, or current shift and select them together.
- Assign in bulk. One shift pattern and one weekly-off rule are applied to the whole selection for the week or the period.
- Sign off via the maker-checker method. The roster is signed off by the second approver before publication, and hence the errors are detected before the agents can see them.
- Compare against attendance. The employee checks in to the application via the geofencing app, and the system will then compare actual attendance to the rostered attendance.
That last step is what turns a roster into daily manpower planning. Managers see who was planned, who showed up, and where the gaps are, while there is still time to act.
How Was the Switch Rolled Out?
The migration had to happen without a gap in attendance or payroll, because a BPO cannot pause shifts while it changes software. Ayuda went live in about four weeks from kickoff, with attendance and payroll running on both systems in parallel for the first pay cycle.
These changes included three main components: migrating employee and shift information from the old HRMS, setting up the geofence and mobile attendance, and creating the bulk roster component along with the regular one.
Mobile attendance was the modification employees experienced most noticeably. Now, agents punch in using their own mobiles, and the geofence verifies that an agent is on the office premises (or elsewhere).
It wasn't because Ayuda required one more generic system for managing attendance. What they wanted was something that would fit into their shift-planning methodology for a BPO. We took it as the main part of our project because it was the very purpose of changing.
What Changed for Ayuda After the Move?
Rostering went from a weekly manual task to a bulk action with an approval step, and Ayuda's 650 users are now active on the platform. The table below shows the before-and-after view.
The bigger shift is in who does the work. Supervisors who spent hours on data entry now spend that time deciding where people should be.
The prior process entailed individual scheduling whereby each and every shift was scheduled separately. In this case, we are able to schedule an entire week’s schedule in one sitting. Any changes that may arise are made after getting approval. The supervisors have been freed from data entry responsibilities.
What Can Other BPOs Learn From Ayuda's Switch?
The lesson is not "buy a new HRMS". It is to test a vendor on your own rostering process before you sign, because that is where generic systems fail a BPO. Ayuda learned the hard way with its first platform.
Three questions are worth asking in any HRMS demo if you run shift-based operations:
- Can I assign a roster to a whole group of employees in one action and mark weekly offs in bulk? If the answer is one employee at a time, your team will be doing the work by hand.
- Is there an approval step, such as maker-checker, for the changes that matter? A second pair of eyes catches mistakes before they reach a shift.
- Can the vendor customise the parts of your workflow that standard settings do not cover? Ask what has been customised for similar operations, and how long it took.
If a vendor answers any of these with "we can customise that later", ask for a timeline in writing.
Who is TankhaPay?
TankhaPay is an HR, payroll and compliance platform built by AKAL Information Systems Ltd., which has operated since 2000 and is CMMI Level 5 appraised and ISO 9001, 20000, 27001 and 14001 certified. It runs HRMS, attendance, payroll and Employer of Record services across all 28 Indian states.
