Industry: Steel Manufacturing
Segment: Integrated Steel Mills, DRI-EAF Plants, Rolling Mills
Region: Middle East & North Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt)
Company Size: 500–5,000+ employees
Buyer Stage: Solution Evaluation

A leading steel manufacturing group in the MENA region ran operations across three plants and multiple shift patterns. The company employed over 3,000 permanent and contract workers across production, maintenance, logistics, and quality departments.

Despite delivering strong output, the workforce operation relied heavily on semi-manual attendance and shift processes.

Over time, these gaps grew into significant operational inefficiencies.

The Core Problem: Workforce Visibility Gaps Impacting Production

The leadership expressed the challenge clearly:

“We have real-time visibility into machines, production metrics, and supply chain movement. But when it comes to manpower availability, everything is reactive.”

The major issues included:

No consolidated attendance data for 3 plants

• HR relying on Excel and scattered biometric logs
• Attendance consolidation from 12 devices each day

Production risk when key operators were absent

• Production supervisors had no real-time visibility. Replacement decisions were guess-based.

Contract workforce completely opaque

• 45% of manpower was vendor managed, with no attendance, skill or shift visibility.

High administrative workload

• The HR team spent 480 hours per month just consolidating data and creating payroll input.
• This wasn’t just about optimizing HR time—production continuity was at risk.

Why It Became Urgent

• Steel demand in GCC expected to grow 6% YoY
• Higher production targets without expanding workforce

Manual or on premise legacy systems no longer matched scale and complexity.

2026 became the natural point for digital transformation.

What Changed with Workforce Automation?

A centralized attendance and shift management solution was deployed across plants, using biometrics, contract worker mapping, and real-time shift dashboards.

The transformation delivered:

✔ Real-time visibility for supervisors & HR

Live headcount by department, shift, location, skill.

✔ Automated shift planning

Multiple rotation patterns, weekly offs, and roster rules auto-applied.

✔ Contract workforce fully integrated

Vendor-managed employees brought under the same system.

✔ Overtime & compliance rules enforced

System prevented manual override and excessive hours.

✔ Hardware-agnostic deployment

Compatible with existing biometric and access control systems.

This created a single operational view of the entire workforce—something spreadsheets could never deliver.

The Results (Within Months)

• 22% reduction in HR administration time
• Complete elimination of manual attendance consolidation
• No payroll leakage from ghost punches or duplicate entries
• 100% compliance with shift & overtime rules
• Instant visibility across plants and work zones

What earlier took hours of reconciliation became real-time and automated.

What Makes the Solution Best-Fit for Steel Manufacturing

Unlike generic attendance platforms, this was engineered for heavy industry:

• Multi-plant & multi-shift architecture
• Configurable for production, furnace, rolling mill, maintenance teams
• Contract workforce + permanent staff handled together
• Device + vendor agnostic

A Shift in Mindset

If you asked stakeholders why change was needed now, the response is simple:

• Workforce visibility is now linked directly to productivity.
• Payroll leakage and overtime costs can silently reach millions.
• Manual shift planning cannot scale with increased production demand.

Steel manufacturing is capital intensive—and so is manpower.
Visibility and control are no longer optional.

If the goal is to eliminate payroll leakage, enforce overtime compliance, and gain real-time visibility across plants:

Explore how automated attendance and shift management works for steel plants.