The Human Element
How a $3B beverage bottler saved 51 hours a week on HR admin
A beverage bottler with 34 locations cut HR case admin time using Harper, Wisq's AI HR teammate. See how it resolved 45% of cases autonomously.
Since launch, Harper has autonomously resolved 45% of time and attendance cases and saved the Field Support team more than 816 hours.
At a $3 billion beverage bottler and distributor, time and attendance issues are a daily reality for frontline managers overseeing merchandisers, warehouse workers, and delivery drivers across 34 locations. Every attendance issue started the same way: a manager picked up the phone or sent an email, opened a case with Employee Relations, and waited for guidance.
A small Employee Relations team was managing more than 300 conduct and time and attendance cases every month across 34 sites, fielding hundreds of back-and-forth emails and consuming nearly 100 hours of HR time in the process.
"The caseload that some of our teams are managing is just astronomical," said one HR manager. "It's just really not something that's supportable by people."
Time and attendance at scale
More than 70 percent of those cases involved time and attendance, a category that looks routine on the surface but carries real complexity. Occurrences accumulate under specific rules, thresholds for corrective action vary, and documentation requirements differ by situation. With 34 locations, every manager needed to apply policy correctly and reach the same answer, regardless of location.
With more than 300 cases a month, the HR team wasn't just answering questions. They were reviewing documentation, role-playing conversations with managers, and verifying that every corrective action was consistent. It was careful, necessary work, and it left the People Support function little capacity for the strategic work they wanted to prioritize.
What changes when every manager has Harper
The company partnered with Wisq, the AI platform for HR, and built the experience around Harper, Wisq's AI HR teammate, configured specifically for their time and attendance policy. A traditional HR chatbot would point a manager to the policy and leave them to interpret it. Harper, however, does the work. It walks the manager through the situation, applies the right policy logic to the occurrences, recommends the corrective action, and drafts the documentation. The shift showed up in individual moments. One manager had never handled a resignation before. He asked Harper, and it walked him through every step he didn't know he needed to take. Another manager, based in a remote location with limited HR support, sat down with Harper for the first time and was "ecstatic," according to his field support contact. "He was able to use Harper to help him get those answers and not have to wait."
From manual casework to 45% autonomous resolution
The before picture is straightforward: nearly 100 hours of HR time spent every month just processing cases. The after picture is just as clear. Forty-five percent of cases are resolved autonomously and the rest handled with Harper doing the heavy lifting, gathering context, assessing risk, recommending actions, and generating documentation, leaving only the final approval for HR.
The cumulative impact since launch tells a bigger story. Harper has saved the Field Support team more than 816 hours of work, roughly 51 hours a week: 605 hours from time and attendance cases since January, and another 210 from policy and benefits questions since the Q&A assistant launched in April.
What those hours represent in practice: 576 completed cases in the past three months alone, spanning the full range of corrective action from verbal coaching to terminations, applied consistently across every location.
The adoption pattern is telling. Usage concentrated at night and on weekends, precisely the moments when managers had no other option. "They don't have that 'I can just pick up the phone and call a person,'" observed the project's Talent Development lead. "So we definitely see more adoption in that arena."
Feedback from managers was direct. "Everything is black and white. For the most part, takes the guessing out of occurrences, which is great." Another: "Makes the process easier to navigate and generates the documentation automatically, which saves a tremendous amount of time."
The survey results back that up. In a poll of managers who had used Harper for time and attendance, 90% said it was easy and intuitive and 78% said it saved them time.
Time and attendance was just the start
Time and attendance was the first use case. Harper is now the front door for HR across the entire company, handling benefits questions, policy inquiries, and corrective actions of every kind. Sixty-three percent of managers surveyed said they want Harper to help them with additional processes. The 816 hours saved so far is just the beginning.
