Classic Lifts
Digital HR Transformation: Secure Onboarding, Training & Staff Management Solution
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Background
Classic Lifts is a major UK independent lift company, providing new lift installation, lift modernisation, and maintenance services. With over 280 direct employees, ten regional centres, and more than 10,000 lifts under maintenance contracts, Classic Lifts serves a wide range of clients, including retail brands, hotels, educational institutions, hospitals, and commercial facilities. Classic Lifts is well known for its technical expertise, high service standards, and “people-first” ethos.
As the business grew, HR operations became more complex. Recruiting new staff, managing training, tracking sickness and leave, ensuring health & safety compliance, handling pensions, and processing salaries were handled through a mix of manual tools, paper forms, spreadsheets, and disconnected software. Onboarding new employees was slow and inconsistent, document versioning was weak, and reporting on staffing metrics was labour-intensive. Classic Lifts recognised that improving its HR function—making it more secure, consistent, and responsive—would both improve staff satisfaction and reduce administrative overheads.
The Need
Classic Lifts required an HR system that would centralise all aspects of staff lifecycle management and improve transparency, compliance, and efficiency. Key requirements included a candidate management system for recruitment, consistent new-staff onboarding workflows and document management, tracking of training history, handling of sickness and annual leave, management of pension contributions, health & safety compliance, and salary processing. The system would need to enforce version control of critical documents, support secure storage and access, provide audit trails, role-based permissions, and generate reports for senior management. It also needed to scale with the company, integrate well with existing systems (payroll, health & safety), and be user-friendly for both HR staff and employees.
The Solution
6B worked closely with Classic Lifts to design and implement a secure, comprehensive HR software system built in PHP. The system covers recruitment through to exit, with modules for candidate tracking, new staff onboarding, document management, training, leave/sickness management, pensions, health & safety, and salary processing.
The candidate management module enables HR staff to post job roles, manage applicants, track interview stages, and store candidate documents securely. Once a candidate is hired, the onboarding workflows guide creation of employee profiles, collection of required documents (contracts, ID, training certifications), assignment of mandatory training, and setup of system access. Training records are retained, and reminders are issued for expiration or required refreshers.
Sickness and annual leave are managed through self-service portals for staff, with approval workflows for managers, visibility of leave balances, and reporting on absence patterns. Pension contributions and health & safety compliance tasks are tracked, documents versioned, and alerts issued for pending safety training or inspections. Salary processing is supported with secure storage of payslips and integration (or hand-off) to payroll systems.
Throughout, strict security was built in: encrypted data storage, encrypted transfer, fine-grained role-based access, audit logs for actions (who did what when), and secure document storage. The development process included close collaboration with Classic Lifts’ HR team and employees to refine the user experience, ensure compliance with legislation, and make the system intuitive and reliable.
The Impact
Since deployment, the new HR system has delivered marked improvements. Onboarding time for new employees has shrunk significantly, with fewer delays gathering required documents, scheduling training, and setting up profile access. HR staff spend much less time tracking paper forms and manually chasing missing information.
Leave and sickness reporting is now more accurate and visible: managers can see absence trends, staff have clearer visibility over their leave balances, and approval workflows are faster and more consistent. Health & safety compliance and training renewal reminders have reduced oversight gaps and risk exposure. Document management is more secure and auditable, reducing versioning errors and ensuring that everyone is working from up-to-date forms.
Payroll and pension-related tasks are more streamlined, with secure stores of payslips and clearer tracking of contributions. Reports generated across the system provide senior management with real-time insight into staff numbers, absenteeism, training status, and compliance issues, helping in strategic planning and risk management.
By unifying HR functions under a secure, scalable platform, Classic Lifts has reduced administrative overhead, increased consistency and transparency, improved staff satisfaction, and strengthened its ability to scale operations without compromising on compliance or control.