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A technology services firm organised into five business units needed one HR, recruitment and payroll platform across all of them — without flattening five operating cultures into a single workflow. The answer was permission architecture rather than process standardisation.
Client
Wavelabs Technologies
Location
Hyderabad, India
Published
October 2026
Reading Time
10 min read
Deploy a unified HR, recruitment and payroll platform across five autonomous business units — preserving divisional operating independence while delivering consolidated visibility, scoped data access, and structured benefit administration.
Wavelabs Technologies delivers engineering, data and AI services to enterprise clients from its Hyderabad base. The organisation is structured into five business units, each carrying its own client portfolio, its own hiring rhythm and its own HR business partner — an arrangement that gives each unit the responsiveness its client base demands. Wavelabs engaged Interloop to implement Zoho People, Zoho Recruit and Zoho Payroll across the full organisation, covering the complete employee lifecycle alongside three custom modules and an automated letter-of-intent process built on Zoho Recruit's blueprint engine. Delivery ran across two phases, with core HR and payroll together in the first and recruitment in the second, followed by unit-by-unit enablement and post-go-live support.
The engagement began as a consolidation brief. Discovery reframed it as an architecture question. The five business units did not work alike, and that was by design rather than drift — each had built its hiring and approval rhythm around the clients it served, and those rhythms were genuinely different. A platform that standardised them into one workflow would have been technically straightforward and operationally unwelcome. The units would have worked around it, and the implementation would have been judged a success on paper while the organisation carried on as before. What the business actually needed was the ability to see across the units without changing how any of them worked. Headcount, hiring pipeline and cost sat in five separate places and were assembled by hand, which put a lag between a question being asked at leadership level and a reliable answer arriving. Alongside this sat a quieter operational load. Three recurring employee requests — benefit enrolment, corporate expense card registration, and salary revision — were each handled over email. They were straightforward individually and substantial in aggregate, and none of them produced a record anyone could refer back to.
Divisional autonomy alongside central visibility: Five business units with genuinely different hiring and approval rhythms, against a leadership requirement for consolidated reporting. Standardising the workflow would have cost adoption; leaving the units alone would have preserved the reporting gap.
Data boundaries between units: Each HR business partner needed to work within their own business unit's data. Without scoped permissions this would have depended on convention rather than system rule.
Recurring requests running on email: Benefit enrolment, expense card registration and salary revision were handled through email threads — workable at the time, but without status, record or audit trail.
Document collection in hiring: Candidate documents arrived by email, and a document returned for correction had no structured path back into the process.
Offer approval across unit boundaries: Letters of intent required business unit head approval, which sat outside any system — making turnaround difficult to see and difficult to report on.
The payroll dependency: Work locations, pay schedules and absent-day syncing must be identical across People and Payroll. Built separately, the two require reconciliation; built together, they are configured once.
Interloop followed a structured, eight-step implementation across two delivery phases — discovery and process analysis, a policy blueprint separating what would be standardised from what would remain federated, dependency-ordered configuration, custom module development, data migration and reconciliation, and unit-by-unit enablement with hypercare through go-live. The decisive work happened before any module was configured. The architecture choice that carried this implementation was a permissions decision, and permissions decisions are expensive to revisit once employee data is in the system.
Implementation Approach
This engagement strengthened Interloop's capability in multi-entity Zoho architecture, and specifically in the question every federated organisation eventually asks: how to deliver central visibility without imposing central process. The answer sits in the permissions layer rather than the process layer, and Wavelabs is where the pattern was established.
Five ways of working. One source of truth. No trade between them.
| Aspect | Before | After (Interloop) |
|---|---|---|
| Reporting across units | Headcount, pipeline and cost assembled by hand from five separate sources | Read directly from one platform, with divisional structure intact |
| Data access | Governed by convention and working relationships | Governed by role and permission, scoped to business unit |
| Benefit enrolment, card registration, salary revision | Handled over email, no status visible, no record retained | Form-driven modules with automated communication and a retained record |
| Candidate document collection | Email-based, with no defined route for a document returned for correction | Verification stages with structured resubmission under a separate header |
| Letter-of-intent approval | Sought outside any system, turnaround difficult to see | A blueprint stage gated by business unit head sign-off |
| HR and payroll alignment | Two configurations to reconcile | One shared definition set, built together |
Headcount, pipeline and cost assembled by hand from five separate sources
Read directly from one platform, with divisional structure intact
Governed by convention and working relationships
Governed by role and permission, scoped to business unit
Handled over email, no status visible, no record retained
Form-driven modules with automated communication and a retained record
Email-based, with no defined route for a document returned for correction
Verification stages with structured resubmission under a separate header
Sought outside any system, turnaround difficult to see
A blueprint stage gated by business unit head sign-off
Two configurations to reconcile
One shared definition set, built together
Before vs. After
Wavelabs runs a single HR, recruitment and payroll platform across five business units, each retaining the approval and hiring rhythm its clients require, with leadership reading across all of them directly. The consolidation the brief asked for was delivered without the standardisation it appeared to require. For Interloop, the engagement established a repeatable architecture for federated organisations and demonstrated end-to-end multi-module delivery across People, Recruit and Payroll, with custom module development and blueprint-driven approval automation in a complex, multi-business-unit technology environment.
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