HRMS Implementation Manager

CEL is selecting and implementing its first full HRMS, covering hire to retire. The programme replaces the existing on-premise payroll application and brings recruitment, attendance, leave, payroll, statutory compliance, document management, feedback and grievance handling into one system across six locations.

Core go-live is fixed at 1 April 2027 employee master, attendance, leave and payroll — preceded by a two-month payroll parallel run that must reconcile to the rupee. This role owns the delivery of that date on the ground.

This is a working implementation role, not a supervisory one. You will be the person who sits with HR and IT, configures and tests with the vendor, chases the data, runs the reconciliations and keeps the programme honest against its gates.

Scope

• Six locations: Kharagpur (plant), Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Pune and Mumbai, spanning four professional-tax regimes.
• Permanent staff population. Workmen, operators on roll and contract labour are outside the current scope.
• Replacement of the incumbent payroll application, including migration of employee master and leave balances.
• Integration with the existing eSSL biometric attendance estate and with SAP S/4HANA for payroll accounting.
• Digitisation and indexing of hard-copy personnel files.

What you will be responsible for

Implementation delivery

• Run the implementation plan against the programme's stage gates — phase, module, owner, dependency, duration and go-live criteria — and report progress against evidence rather than opinion.
• Manage the selected vendor day to day: scope, configuration backlog, issue log, UAT, and escalation when the vendor slips.
• Keep a documented rollback position for anything touching payroll.

Data migration and reconciliation

• Extract, clean and migrate the employee master, and reconcile it against existing records employee by employee.
• Migrate opening leave balances and reconcile them to the current system, including resolving differences in opening-balance definitions.
• Run the payroll parallel for two consecutive months and reconcile to the rupee, with every variance explained and closed before cutover. This is the hardest gate on the programme and the one you will be judged on.

Configuration

• Translate CEL's leave policy and standing orders into tested configuration — accrual, carry-forward, encashment, lapse, comp-off and the holiday-within-leave rule.
• Configure attendance: three rotating eight-hour shifts, a general shift, twelve-hour patterns, shifts that cross midnight, late-coming slab deductions, overtime and half-day rules.
• Configure the salary structure and allowance heads, and verify statutory computation for PF, ESI, professional tax across four states, LWF and TDS.
• Configure role-based access, maker-checker on payroll master changes, and the audit trail, to a standard that survives an ITGC review.

Integration

• Deliver live attendance capture from the eSSL biometric estate into the HRMS, and prove it end to end on real data.
• Deliver the payroll journal posting into SAP S/4HANA, working with CEL's SAP team, and reconcile it.
• Support the cost centre mapping between the HRMS and SAP FICO.

Statutory and compliance

• Ensure the system produces the statutory outputs the Kolkata head office needs — PF ECR, ESI return, state-wise professional tax challans, LWF, 24Q and Form 16 — in usable form, and that the head office team can work with them.
• Establish which statutory registers the HRMS becomes the system of record for, and ensure migration does not break the retention chain.
• Work within CEL's data-protection position: employee personal data is handled on a need-to-know basis and is not shared with vendors unmasked.

Adoption and handover

• Deliver level-wise user training before go-live, across HR, managers and employee self-service.
• Digitisation of personnel files: agree the scope, run the effort, and get the indexing right the first time.
• Produce the documentation and hand over to a named internal system owner, so the system has an owner in post before you leave.