How a management consulting firm replaced five office-specific HR processes with one global system and finally got a straight answer on who was available to staff a project.
Industry:
Professional Services / Management Consulting
Team Size:
290 consultants across 5 offices
Headquarters:
Toronto, Canada
Toronto, Canada
Canada, UK, UAE, Singapore, South Africa
Remire Products:
HRIS Platform, Payroll Management, Onboarding, Performance Reviews
The firm is a mid-size management consulting practice with 290 consultants spread across five offices in Canada, the UK, the UAE, Singapore, and South Africa. Consultants are staffed onto client engagements that often span offices and time zones, with utilization, availability, and skill matching driving how the firm assigns work and bills clients.
In a consulting firm, HR data is more than an administrative record. It drives staffing, client delivery, and revenue.
Managers need to know who is on the bench, who has capacity next month, who holds the right certifications, and who is due for a performance review. Those answers directly affect project staffing decisions.
By 2025, the firm’s head of talent no longer trusted the HR data they relied on. Each of the five offices had built its own HR process independently, with different spreadsheets, different review cycles, and different definitions of “available.” The firm had grown into a structure that made basic staffing decisions harder than they should have been.
The Head of Talent’s honest assessment: “If the Singapore partner asked me who was free next month across all five offices, it would take me three days to give an answer I wasn’t fully confident in.”
The biggest issue came when the firm nearly lost a cross-border project. No one could quickly confirm whether consultants with the required certifications were available across two offices before the client’s deadline.
The proposal team spent two days contacting office managers to check consultant availability. They couldn’t even respond to the client until they had the information. The delay almost cost the firm the engagement.
The firm’s 52% performance review completion rate created another challenge. Many consultants weren’t receiving regular feedback. Without complete performance data, leadership couldn’t make confident promotion decisions during the next review cycle.
The Head of Talent’s search led to Remire, a global hiring platform that helps companies hire, pay, and manage their workforce across 60+ countries. For a professional services firm with cross-office staffing needs, three things mattered most:
One real-time view of availability.
Remire’s HRIS gave partners and staffing managers a single dashboard to view consultant availability, utilization, and upcoming bench time across all five offices. Information that once took days to collect was now available in seconds.
Centralized skills and certification tracking.
Every consultant’s certifications, language skills, industry expertise, and project experience were stored in one searchable system. Managers no longer had to rely on partners’ memories to find the right people for client engagements.
Automated review cycles.
Remire replaced the email-based review process with automated performance review workflows. Managers received reminders, used standardized review templates, and tracked progress through dedicated dashboards. As a result, the low 52% review completion rate improved significantly.
Remire’s rollout unified all five offices’ HR processes within four weeks.
01
All 290 consultant records, including certifications, language skills, industry experience, and project history, were consolidated from five separate spreadsheets into Remire’s HRIS platform. The migration created the firm’s first genuinely searchable skills database.
02
Consultant availability, current engagement load, and upcoming bench time became visible in real time across all five offices. Staffing leads can now answer cross-office availability questions immediately instead of polling office managers over email for days.
03
A consistent onboarding workflow was rolled out to all five offices, replacing the patchwork of structured programs and ad hoc laptop-and-Slack-invite processes. Every new consultant now goes through the same documented onboarding experience regardless of office.
04
Review templates, automated reminders, and manager dashboards were configured for the firm’s review cadence. Completion is now tracked centrally with escalating reminders for overdue reviews, replacing the email chain that consultants and managers had been routinely ignoring.
05
Leave balances, requests, and approvals were managed in one system across all five offices. Staffing managers had a single, reliable view of consultant availability when planning multi-office projects. This helped prevent last-minute staffing gaps and scheduling surprises
Within four months, the operational impact reached well beyond HR into how the firm staffed and won work.
80%
Faster cross-office staffing reports—from 3 days to under 1 day
95%
Performance review completion, up from 52%
290
Consultants with searchable skills and certification records
5 → 1
Office HR processes unified into one system
2
Cross-border engagements won using real-time staffing data
100%
Consultants onboarded through a standardized process
Winning two cross-border engagements proved the value of the new system. In both cases, the proposal team confirmed consultant availability and required certifications within hours.
Under the old five-spreadsheet process, that would have taken days. The faster response helped the firm secure both client contracts.
For a professional services firm, HR data is more than an administrative function. It supports staffing decisions that directly affect client delivery and revenue.
But with five disconnected office processes, the firm couldn’t answer basic staffing questions quickly. Performance reviews were also inconsistent, leaving nearly half of consultants without timely feedback.
Remire’s HRIS replaced fragmented spreadsheets with a single, real-time system for skills, availability, onboarding, and performance reviews. The firm didn’t just improve HR operations. It built a reliable foundation for faster staffing decisions and won cross-office projects that were previously out of reach.
“We nearly lost a major cross-border engagement because we couldn’t answer a simple staffing question fast enough. That’s not a talent problem we had the right people. It was an information problem. Remire gave us one place where every consultant’s skills, availability, and certifications live, visible across all five offices in real time. We’ve won engagements specifically because we could move faster than firms still running this on spreadsheets.”
Confidential — Management Consulting Firm, Toronto
Stop losing engagements to a staffing question you can’t answer fast enough.
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