Replacing SAP for a government entity’s new company

The situation

The parent entity runs on SAP. They were happy with it, but it’s expensive. When they created a subsidiary, giving the new company its own SAP setup was out of the question on cost alone.

So the brief wasn’t to fix something broken. It was to give the new company what SAP gives the parent, at a price that made sense. Zoho One won.

What I built

I took charge of the entire HR process. I sat down with the Head of HR and with their SAP consultants, collected every function and report they relied on, and rebuilt all of it inside Zoho.

• Zoho People CORE HR

  • Timesheets and leave, set up to their policies.
  • Onboarding and offboarding, including the many HR templates they work with.
  • Hiring approval forms, so a new position is approved before recruiting starts.
  • The reporting they had in SAP, rebuilt so nothing they relied on was lost.

• Zoho Recruit + Forms INTERNAL HIRING

  • A private hiring pipeline. They don’t post jobs publicly, so the process is built around their own internal recruitment.
  • Candidate document collection that adapts to the candidate. With one button, the right version of the form goes out. A non-Emirati married candidate, for example, gets a different form from an Emirati single one, with options already set from their profile.
  • Security clearance and case study submissions, collected as part of the pipeline.
  • A custom interview evaluation form, built in Zoho Creator.

• Zoho Creator PAYROLL ENGINE

  • Why not Zoho Payroll? The UAE edition couldn’t handle their rules. Allowances depend on things like whether an employee’s spouse works for a government agency, how many children they have, and flight ticket allowances by destination.
  • So I helped build an automated payroll calculator in Creator that applies those rules for every employee.

• Zoho Creator E-PROCUREMENT

  • A procurement app for the finance team. Another developer led the finance side; I built parts of the functionality and the PDF generation.
  • In use every day to request and manage purchases.

The result

• SAP-level HR, for lessEvery function and report they asked for, on Zoho One.
• Payroll that follows their rulesSpouse, children and flight allowances calculated automatically.
• Candidate paperwork on autopilotThe right form for each candidate, sent with one button.
• Procurement in daily useAlongside the HR apps, as part of how the company runs.