From spreadsheets to one system for 12,000+ workers.
A2Z Group is a listed infrastructure services company headquartered in Gurugram, founded in 2002. Its businesses span engineering, procurement and construction for the power and telecom sectors, municipal solid waste management, and power generation. Its largest business, facility management, maintains corporate offices, malls, railway stations, airports and other commercial and public spaces across India.
Manual work that grew with the workforce.
A2Z's workforce operations ran on Google Sheets and an outdated payroll system. Attendance, onboarding, transfers and salary processing were all handled manually, and every payroll cycle meant pulling together data from sources that didn't talk to each other. As the workforce grew, that manual effort grew with it. Kanika Mittal, A2Z's COO, brought me in to find a scalable, automated solution.
The workforce made the problem harder:
Most employees have limited education and use low-cost phones. A system they don't understand, they simply stop using.
People leave and come back regularly, and move between A2Z's clients, so the same person can have several employment records.
Margins are thin. Most HRMS products charge per employee, and at A2Z's headcount and churn, that pricing doesn't work.
Defined what the system actually had to do.
I turned the business problem into a detailed requirements document covering three audiences: A2Z's HR and admin team, its clients, and its employees. I challenged every requirement on cost and value, from exactly what each dashboard should show, to how tightly sensitive documents should be shared, to whether some features were worth building at all.
Evaluated the market against A2Z's reality.
We tested several off-the-shelf HRMS products against four questions:
Chose an open-source platform instead.
ERPNext and Frappe HR carry no licence fees and no per-user charges, so costs don't grow with headcount. Customising them was far cheaper than building from scratch or paying per employee indefinitely.
Picked the partner.
I selected Auriga IT because of its depth in Frappe and its track record building products on it. From the first conversation, the team understood A2Z's use cases and pain points.
Made the calls that affected adoption.
The biggest was switching the employee app from a web app to a native iOS and Android app. Native apps run better on low-cost phones with limited storage and memory, and they made geo-fenced check-ins practical. That meant attendance only counts when the employee is actually at the client site.
Laid the foundation for finance.
Because ERPNext covers accounting as well as HR, I set up the groundwork to bring A2Z's finance onto the same platform, so payroll, client billing and project costs could all come from one source of data.
Akshit excels at simplifying complex requirements into clear, actionable plans, and his expertise in selecting the right technology stack and liaising with vendors has notably accelerated our progress.
I wholeheartedly recommend Akshit to any organization seeking a strategic, forward-thinking technology leader who can bring clarity, speed, and vision to complex projects.”