A mid-sized manufacturing company with 900+ employees across three plants was struggling to align shop-floor productivity with organizational goals. Performance reviews were largely annual, subjective, and spreadsheet-driven, while daily work updates came through WhatsApp messages, paper registers, and verbal instructions. This led to unclear accountability, missed deadlines, and limited visibility for management into who was doing what, and how it connected to KPIs. Phi EDGE HRMS, built for HR by HR practitioners, was engaged to redesign their Performance Management System (PMS) and implement Task Management with Daily Work Management (DWM) as part of an integrated HRMS rollout.
The client’s challenges
The HR and operations teams identified four major pain points before implementation. First, performance management was seen as a formality; goals were not cascaded, and employees did not clearly understand how their work linked to plant-level and business targets. Second, supervisors lacked a structured way to assign, track, and review daily tasks, which led to disputes about workload, delays, and quality incidents. Third, there was no data-backed way to differentiate high performers from average performers for increments, incentives, or promotions. Finally, leadership lacked real-time dashboards that could correlate production, adherence to plans, and individual performance, making reviews reactive rather than proactive.
Why Phi EDGE HRMS was chosen
The client evaluated multiple tools but wanted a solution that combined PMS, task management, and HR data in one place instead of using three separate systems. Phi EDGE HRMS stood out because it offered integrated Performance Management and Task Management with DWM inside the same HRIS layer, ensuring that goals, KRAs, and day-to-day work could be tracked together. The leadership also valued that Phi EDGE HRMS is implemented and guided by HR domain experts (“for HR, by HR”), who could speak the language of HR and operations and not just technology. Additionally, Phi EDGE operates as an ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified company, giving the client confidence that sensitive performance and productivity data across plants would be managed under robust information security standards.
PMS implementation: from vague ratings to goal-driven performance
In the first phase, Phi EDGE worked with HR and plant heads to redesign the PMS framework. Organization-level goals were broken down into plant, department, and role-based KRAs, with measurable KPIs for production output, quality, downtime, safety, and 5S adherence. These KRAs/KPIs were configured in the PMS module, allowing employees and managers to see expectations clearly and track progress during the year, not just at appraisal time.
Self-assessment, manager reviews, and cross-functional feedback were all moved into the system, replacing emails and Excel sheets. The client enabled quarterly check-ins instead of only annual reviews, using Phi EDGE to capture comments, ratings, and development plans centrally. Within the first appraisal cycle, HR reported a significant reduction in manual collation time and a more transparent link between ratings, increments, and variable pay decisions. Managers could now justify their evaluations with data from both PMS and DWM, reducing conflicts and grievances around “unfair ratings.”
Task Management with DWM: bringing daily discipline and visibility
The second phase focused on Task Management and Daily Work Management. Supervisors began using Phi EDGE to assign daily and weekly tasks to operators, technicians, and line leaders—defining priorities, timelines, and expected outcomes for each task. Employees could view their assigned tasks on their portal, update status, log completion details, and attach relevant documents or images where needed. This replaced manual registers and informal communication, creating a digital trail of who did what and when.
Managers used DWM dashboards to see pending, in-progress, and completed tasks by line, shift, and individual, which helped them redistribute workload and identify bottlenecks early. Over time, the operations head started using DWM reports in daily review meetings, aligning plant output discussions with actual task completion data rather than anecdotal feedback. HR integrated certain DWM metrics—such as adherence to plan, closure rates, and recurring delays—into performance discussions to reinforce accountability.
Measurable outcomes for the manufacturing client
Within 9–12 months of deploying PMS and Task Management with DWM through Phi EDGE HRMS, the client saw tangible improvements. The appraisal cycle time reduced significantly because data was already structured and available within the system, cutting weeks of manual consolidation work for HR. Supervisors reported better clarity on expectations and priorities for their teams, leading to improved on-time task completion rates and fewer escalations about “unclear instructions.”
The correlation between performance ratings and variable pay strengthened, backed by PMS and DWM analytics, which improved employee perception of fairness and transparency in the process. Leadership gained consolidated dashboards that showed performance trends by plant, department, and role, helping them identify high-potential employees, training needs, and areas of chronic delay or underperformance. The client’s HR head summarized the impact as a shift “from chasing updates to managing outcomes,” with HR now able to contribute insights to production and strategy discussions rather than just processing forms.
By combining an HR-practitioner-led design approach, robust PMS, and tightly integrated Task Management with DWM on a secure, ISO-certified platform, Phi EDGE HRMS helped this manufacturing organization embed performance, accountability, and data-driven decision-making into its daily operations—turning HR and line management into true strategic partners on the shop floor.
