How Manulift eliminated 8 hours of weekly manual work and unified HR across 450 employees

The Challenge

Manulift’s HR team was managing a national workforce with tools that were never designed to work together.

A legacy payroll system handled pay runs. Excel files tracked HR records. Separate spreadsheets supported time tracking and premium pay. Time-off requests moved through Word and Excel. Recruiting lived in its own silo. For a company operating across Canada—with team leads, night-shift employees, road crews, and location-specific policies—that created a daily operational burden.

As the team put it, there was no single source of truth. Reporting was payroll-oriented, but HR could not easily pull a complete employee record. Even simple employee changes could require updates across multiple systems, creating delays, confusion, and room for error

Time off was one of the clearest examples. Each request had to be managed manually, with approvals and inputs flowing through disconnected documents and spreadsheets. That process alone consumed 7–8 hours every week.

Premium pay was just as complex. Team lead premiums, night-shift differentials, and road-crew structures all had to be calculated in spreadsheets—adding another layer of manual work to an already fragmented process.

When Manulift began evaluating HRIS platforms, the team reviewed 42 options. Rippling stood out because it offered the depth Manulift needed across HR, payroll, recruiting, time off, performance, and workflows—while still giving the team room to customize processes without relying on technical resources.

The Solution

Rippling gave Manulift a unified workforce platform flexible enough to match the way the business actually operates.

Unlike systems that required XML or custom coding to configure forms and fields, Rippling let Manulift build custom fields, workflows, onboarding flows, and internal apps directly in the platform. That flexibility mattered for a business with complex roles, policies, and pay structures across provinces and teams.

With Rippling, Manulift connected core employee data to the downstream systems and policies that depend on it. A change in an employee profile could automatically update punch behavior, time-off policies, and other operational workflows—giving HR more control and reducing the number of manual updates required.

The team also used Rippling’s no-code capabilities to build a custom recruiting activity tracker, including auto-generated follow-up tasks. Instead of managing hiring activity in a disconnected tool, Manulift could bring recruiting closer to the rest of the employee lifecycle.

What Changed

• Time-off management became largely automated. Employees can now submit, edit, and cancel requests directly in Rippling, with accruals calculated automatically. Since launch, Manulift has processed more than 7,061 time-off requests through the platform.

• Premium pay calculations moved out of spreadsheets. Team lead premiums, night shifts, and road-crew structures now calculate automatically, reducing manual effort and helping the team manage complex pay rules more consistently.

• IT onboarding became zero-touch. New hires automatically trigger Active Directory provisioning and IT ticket creation, removing the manual handoff that used to happen between HR and IT.

• Recruiting became part of the broader employee lifecycle. Manulift built a custom recruiting app inside Rippling, giving the team a tailored way to track activity and follow-up tasks without adding another external system.

• Employee data became more connected. Instead of relying on exports and spreadsheets, Manulift can manage HR, payroll, time off, recruiting, workflows, and employee changes from a single platform.

The Impact

By replacing disconnected systems with Rippling, Manulift reduced manual work and gained a more flexible operating model for HR.

The most tangible impact came from time off: a process that previously required 7–8 hours of manual work every week is now largely automated. For employees, requests are easier to submit and manage. For HR, approvals, accruals, and policy logic are handled in the system instead of across Word documents and spreadsheets.

Rippling also helped Manulift automate the complexity around premium pay, IT onboarding, and recruiting operations. Rather than syncing information across separate tools, the team can make changes once and have those changes flow into the systems and policies that depend on them.

For Manulift, the value of Rippling was not just consolidation. It was control: the ability to configure the platform around the company’s processes, build custom workflows without technical support, and scale HR operations across a coast-to-coast workforce.