“Vacation Planning” Solution for a Pharmaceutical Company

Project Title

Implementation of the “Vacation Planning” solution based on the Directum system at a pharmaceutical company with over 2,000 employees.

Client

A pharmaceutical manufacturing company employing over 2,000 staff members.

Project Goal

The company faced the following tasks:

• Formulating and approving annual vacation schedules
• Processing annual leave requests
• Processing additional leave requests
• Generating vacation orders (for annual and additional leave)
• Monitoring the execution of the vacation plan

Prior to contacting us, vacation records were tracked across two disconnected systems: an accounting system and a document management system, managed by different departments. The accounting system tracked remaining leave balances, while the document management system handled vacation planning.

It was necessary to establish standard operating procedures for handling leave applications and address synchronization issues between these systems: correctly structuring the leave balance tracking process, as well as seamlessly coordinating employee actions for taking leave and displaying accurate leave balances in both systems.

An important project nuance: factory plant workers generally do not have direct access to the vacation tracking system. Someone needed to submit vacation details on their behalf. Therefore, the system required an approval and notification workflow to inform employees whether their leave was approved, what additional documents needed to be submitted to accounting to finalize approval, and so on.

Project Challenges

As an industrial enterprise, the company complies with all statutory types of leave provided by current legislation. Management set the following objectives for our team:

• Forecast the financial impact during months with high employee leave volumes, including payout compensations
• Maintain established operational workflows at the plant while ensuring employees receive leave in full compliance with labor laws
• Track unused leave days to enable either monetary compensation or monitored usage of accrued time off

Implementation Objectives:

• Bring leave provision procedures into full compliance with applicable labor legislation
• Establish a control mechanism for compliance with labor regulations
• Reduce the overall time required to approve leave requests
• Create a single point of registration for all leave applications
• Ensure complete transparency throughout the approval process

Solution & Implementation

We enabled the ability to submit leave applications on behalf of another employee. We automated the approval process while preserving the company’s existing hierarchy—a bottom-up structure where direct managers approve initial leave, followed by higher-level department heads approving unit-wide schedules.

During development, we built an intuitive calendar-based selection mechanism where employees could visually highlight start and end dates. Vacation data was automatically transferred to the application form. If an employee scheduled multiple leave periods across the year, they appeared highlighted in different colors on their annual schedule.

Department heads utilized the same visual calendar interface, allowing them to review team schedules at a glance and make quick approval decisions.

Beyond planning, the system also tracked actual leave usage. It automatically sent advance notifications to employees, managers, and accounting prior to scheduled leave start dates.

At the customer’s request, there was no rigid binding to the initial annual schedule, allowing employees flexibility to adjust leave start dates within the system.

Project Results

Implementing the “Vacation Planning” solution on the Directum platform enabled the company to complete its annual vacation approval campaign within just one month. The solution integrated seamlessly with the organization’s accounting platform, providing bi-directional data synchronization of unused leave balances between accounting and document management systems.

“We really enjoyed working with the business stakeholder. Communication was very constructive, with no difficulties in designing and agreeing on business processes. This is crucial and quite rare on projects of this scale. Additionally, to execute the project successfully, we deepened our knowledge of labor legislation regarding personnel management.”

Inna Khomenko, Project Manager

Key Metrics

• Annual vacation planning timeline reduced from 3 months to 3 weeks
• Direct employee inquiries to HR and accounting reduced by 3x
• Errors in vacation paperwork processing reduced by 6x
• Volume of unused vacation days reduced by 3x