RODIS — Workforce
Intelligence Platform
Unified WFH attendance and timesheet platform. Built during COVID-19 lockdown for 10,000+ employees using zero new budget and existing infrastructure. The real insight: this was not a tracking problem. It was a data reconciliation problem across three systems that were not designed to talk to each other.
corrections reduced
close time saved
GreytHR to timesheet
reconciliation steps
COVID-19 forced the build. 10,000 employees went WFH overnight. RFID attendance became obsolete. But the real problem: three disconnected systems (hardware attendance, HR system of record, manual billing) did not talk to each other. 40%+ of timesheet entries were manual post-hoc corrections. A signal of systemic failure, not user error.
"I submitted my leave last week but the timesheet still shows me absent. Now my pay is wrong and I have to chase three people to fix it." The pain was distributed across every persona. Employees did not trust the system. Managers spent hours reconciling. Finance could not close billing cycles on time.
Core innovation: Instead of self-declared attendance, ActivityVault triangulates 3 independent signals. All three must be active for a 30-minute window to count as productive time. No screen recording. No keystroke logs. No website history. Ever.
OS kernel active. Device is on. Necessary but not sufficient.
Valid IP plus VPN handshake. Confirms connectivity.
Keyboard or mouse input detected. Employee is actually working, not just connected.
Privacy by design: 5-minute idle threshold. Tracking scoped to shift hours only. Evening and weekend activity architecturally excluded. Offline caching for brief Wi-Fi drops. Total Work Hours = (End Time minus Start Time) minus Total Idle Time.
| Stakeholder | Concern | What moved them |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | Needed accurate billing codes. Zero tolerance for ambiguity. | Billing code integration gave single source of truth. Days-delayed billing quantified. |
| HR | Worried about re-training burden. | Made co-authors of the leave sync spec. Approved something they helped build. |
| Engineering | Concerned about scope creep. | Framed as a lightweight data connector, not a new product. |
| Managers | Did not want more admin steps. | Approvals made exception-based only. Most opted in voluntarily. |
| Employees | Feared surveillance optics. | All-hands transparency before any rumour. Showed exactly what was and was not tracked. |
HR wanted a grace period. Finance wanted strict rules. Rather than picking a side, I separated data capture from policy enforcement. Solution: System-on signal within 90 minutes of scheduled start = confirmed attendance. Outside that window = flagged for manager review, not auto-absent. Finance got auditability. HR got employee protection. Agreement came in one meeting.
Three months post-launch: 18% of employees not generating valid signals. Root cause: hybrid-work edge case. An employee working across office and home in a single day. System treated office session close as end-of-day, missing the home session. I called it out publicly. Proposed a short-term fix and medium-term multi-session stitching logic. The steering committee increased investment in the project because of how the miss was handled.
Context: This was submitted as an assignment for a WFM product design challenge, designing a vacation bidding system for unionised airline workforces. It extends the RODIS workforce intelligence thinking into a global enterprise WFM context.
WFM Planning Proposal — Vacation bidding approval queue for airline workforce
Major airlines spend 4 to 6 weeks on a process that should take 6 hours
Vacation bidding is still done manually. No digital trail, no transparency, redundant process, seniority errors. The result: union grievances, scheduler bottlenecks, and coverage gaps discovered after allocation windows close.
Not scheduler efficiency. The worker experience is the north star because it is what union grievances are filed about.
Auto-approve. No human in loop. Availability sufficient, operational coverage guaranteed.
Routes to manager queue. FIFO processing. 48-hour SLA. Bulk approve or deny with documented reason.
Worker cannot submit directly. System shows nearest green or orange alternative. Manager can override with documented reason.
