Custom ERP for a Recruitment Consultancy
Modernizing a legacy ERP landscape for a major recruitment consultancy — consolidating payroll, reporting, contract management, and invoicing into a unified, cloud-based platform.
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Project Snapshot
- Duration
- 6 years
- Scope
- Custom ERP modernization and cloud migration
- Integrations
- Payroll system, SAP, cloud infrastructure
- Key Outcomes
- Automated contracts, real-time reporting, gross margin visibility
- Project status
- In production, Actively maintained
About the Client
While trillions are spent each year on paper-based document management worldwide, many companies still struggle to retire manual processes and go paperless — held back by the cost and complexity of ERP customization projects.
Client
A leading European recruitment consultancy (under NDA) that manages multiple classes of permanent and temporary job candidates and employees across a range of industries. The company provides a compliant legal framework for every party involved. Its labour-intensive accounting and contract management processes had outgrown the old toolset and were ready for modernization.
The Problem
The company relied on SAP alongside a separate payroll system for payment management and invoicing. A meaningful slice of day-to-day data handling was still done manually because the existing ERP stack simply did not support the required workflows. New capabilities were needed — particularly around reporting and commissions — and the disconnected systems made it impossible to see the full picture in real time.
Key Challenges
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Boosting an aging system's capabilities
The legacy landscape combined several pieces of software. Some components needed to be replaced outright; others had to be integrated into the new platform without disrupting day-to-day operations.
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Insufficient or outdated documentation
The documentation had not kept pace with years of system evolution. To close the gaps, we partnered closely with subject-matter experts to capture the domain knowledge needed to design the API and reconstruct business rules.
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Data scalability and maintenance
The new system had to be robust enough to handle significantly larger volumes of data while keeping reporting and contract operations responsive.
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Strategic resource management with a lean team
Agile methodology and an iterative delivery approach allowed us to manage capacity carefully and ship incremental business value at every step, prioritizing the highest-impact features first.
Our Solution
CodeTiburon mapped out a lean path to automating the recruitment process and synchronizing the payroll system with SAP, consolidating the legacy ERP modules into a single, cloud-based platform that gives managers, consultants, and administrators a unified, real-time view of the business.
Our Process
Requirements gathering and specification for the initial estimate
The client shared their initial requirements, and we filled in the gaps left by missing or outdated documentation so we could provide a reliable ballpark estimate of the effort involved.
BA sessions, design, architecture, and interactive prototyping
Because the legacy documentation was sparse and outdated, we reverse-engineered key parts of the system, ran in-depth business analysis sessions, and built an interactive prototype to validate every assumption before writing production code.
Core implementation and testing
We built an API to connect the ERP modules and digitized the manual recruitment process, encoding the business rules for every contract type. The core solution was delivered to tight deadlines with a lean team and handed over to the test group for early feedback.
Staging, real-time testing, and focus-group enablement
Once the core flows were validated, we promoted the system to staging for real-time testing. A focus group of employees was trained on the platform and helped refine the experience before wider rollout.
Go-live, stabilization, and onsite training
We deployed the system to production and continued onsite training to roll the platform out across the company. Adoption is being driven gradually, while we work in parallel on continuous improvement — once users are comfortable with the new system and start seeing its benefits, we move on to the next set of enhancements.
Key Features
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Integrations
Integrations eliminate manual hand-offs and enable error-free data transfer between systems. Beyond the immediate efficiency gains, they remove blind spots and let the company see the bigger picture: managers gain clarity through reports, consultants see a clear payment breakdown in their personalized wallets, and administrators can monitor the performance of every business unit. Moving the data to the cloud also unlocks greater mobility within strict security boundaries.
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Gross margin reporting
The new platform gives company management one-click access to real-time reports that can be viewed, downloaded, or emailed instantly. The gross margin report in particular offers clean visualizations alongside precise textual totals of the current year's profitability.
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Contract management
Contract management is now automated end-to-end. Time-consuming manual data gathering and manipulation has been replaced by digital forms and one-click updates — saving hours of work, eliminating human error, and providing the right level of clarity for every employee type.
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Complete payroll calculation
The legacy system handled payment calculations reliably but lacked granularity. By consolidating the legacy and the new platforms, we kept the strengths of both worlds and added the visibility that managers and consultants needed.
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Security
Hosting the system in the cloud was both an advantage and a challenge. On one hand, anytime-anywhere access was a major win for a distributed workforce. On the other, it raised the security bar significantly. This is where we excelled — designing the right architectural safeguards and aligning distributed service providers around them.
Outcomes
The new platform replaced years of accumulated manual work with a single, integrated source of truth. Managers gained real-time visibility into gross margin and business-unit performance, consultants got transparent payment breakdowns in their personalized wallets, and administrators traded spreadsheets and reconciliations for one-click reports and automated contract workflows. Contract management was digitized end-to-end, payroll calculations were consolidated with full granularity, and the move to the cloud unlocked secure anytime-anywhere access for a distributed workforce.
Since 2020, CodeTiburon continues to maintain and evolve the system day to day — shipping new features, hardening security, scaling capacity, and adapting the platform as the business grows.
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