Project reference · Food manufacturing
Seven years as a factory’s HR department.
A foreign-owned food plant in Ukraine runs around the clock to supply international customers. When its owners called us in, the plant had about eighty employees, a collective agreement that broke the Labour Code in thirteen places, and no one in charge of HR. We rebuilt the function, ran it and its payroll through two changes of owner, and came back years later to redesign the shifts.
Seven years, one client
Continuity
About 80 people, paid twice a month
Payroll
13 labour-law gaps closed
Compliance
Two changes of owner
Ownership
The last project
From two crews to three
In high season the plant worked six days and six nights a week on two crews. That kept output up and pay close to the market, but only through overtime the Labour Code does not allow.
The brief
What the client actually needed
At first, two senior hires: a finance director and a head of production. Then the harder request. The owners were abroad, the plant’s HR paperwork had drifted out of line with Ukrainian law, and a labour inspection had noticed. They needed someone on the ground who could fix it and then keep it fixed.
That meant the obvious work: contracts, orders, holiday schedules and payroll. It also meant work permits for the expatriate who ran the plant, a collective agreement negotiated with the workforce, clear rules on who could sign what, and support whenever auditors, social-security inspectors or the customers’ own social auditors came to visit.
The hard parts
Where it gets difficult
Fixing the rules while people are paid under them
A new collective agreement, pay regulation and grading system had to be negotiated with the workforce’s representatives and registered with the authorities, while the old rules still set everyone’s pay that month.
Owners change, payroll does not
The parent group was sold twice while we worked for the plant. Each sale brought new signatories, new auditors and new reporting lines. Staff still had to be paid on the same two days every month.
A plant that cannot pause
Continuous production means night work, evening premiums, weekend cover and cleaning crews on their own rotas. Ukrainian law caps overtime at 120 hours a year per worker, and in high season the plant was using that up in two months.
Wartime
From 2014 some employees were called up for military service. The law protects their jobs and average pay while they serve, and the plant had to keep running without them.
Management in three languages
Owners in the United States and European managers working in English, a workforce speaking Ukrainian and Russian. Every regulation we wrote existed in at least two languages.
Audits from every side
Internal-control auditors sent by the owners, social-security inspectors, and the social audits large customers require from their suppliers. Each needed complete, consistent records, and we prepared the plant for every one of them.
What we did
Search, rebuild, run, redesign
- 2011–12 · Search. Placed the finance director and the head of production, and ran a general-manager search for a sister plant in another country.
- 2012–14 · Rebuild. Our HR director worked on site: collective agreement, pay and bonus regulation, job descriptions, holiday schedules, settlement of unpaid overtime and work permits for the expatriate manager.
- 2013–17 · Run. HR administration and payroll moved to us after two months of parallel calculation and a formal go/no-go decision: pay twice a month, holiday and sick pay, reporting to the tax office and social funds, a salary slip for every employee.
- 2018–19 · Redesign. A salary market study, two full-year budgets compared side by side, a three-shift rota and a new pay system, written into a new collective agreement.
The client came back to us in 2018, four years after our HR director had left the site. For a service like this, that is the reference that counts.
In the client’s words
“You have already brought order to our HR once before.”
The plant’s HR manager, asking us back for the three-shift project in 2018.
How we work
We do not show you another company’s name
The client, its owners and its people are not named here, and they will not be named in a meeting either. We are glad to talk this project through in detail. What we will not do is discuss the last client that way with you, or you with the next one.
Next step
Running a plant in Ukraine from abroad?
Whether it is one payroll or a whole HR function, thirty minutes is usually enough to tell you where the risks are.
