Digital Onboarding for the Apprenticeship Start: HELITS HRIS in Practice

Every year in Bavaria, the beginning of September brings the same ritual: new apprentices start, often several at once, and HR discovers that the paper folder with employment contract, safety-briefing record, privacy notice and equipment list starts all over again. A trades business from the Berchtesgadener Land region with 65 employees described exactly this problem to us: nine new apprentices in one intake, each with their own folder, their own signature list, their own set of mandatory briefings — and one HR administrator who barely got to anything else in the first week of September. We switched the onboarding process to HELITS HRIS, and the numbers from the first digital intake show why it pays off.

Where the time in classic onboarding actually disappears

The real effort in onboarding rarely lies in creating the documents themselves but in chasing them down. Who has already signed the workplace-safety briefing, who hasn't? Is the privacy notice complete for all nine apprentices? Is a copy of the training contract still missing for the chamber of commerce? At the Berchtesgadener Land business, before the switch, this ran on a spreadsheet manually reconciled against paper signatures — error-prone, and effectively impossible to cover for if the responsible person was out sick, because nobody else knew the current status.

Based on our experience across several projects, pure tracking and chasing typically costs eleven to fourteen hours per intake of six to ten new apprentices — time spent entirely on control, not on actually integrating the new hires.

What actually changes with digital onboarding

In HELITS HRIS, every newly hired person gets an automated checklist containing exactly the documents and confirmations required for their specific role — an apprentice in the workshop needs different evidence than an office employee. Contracts, privacy notice and safety briefing are provided digitally and signed with a qualified electronic signature; status is visible to HR at a glance at any time, without anyone having to ask individually. Missing signatures automatically trigger a reminder instead of HR having to remember on its own.

At the Berchtesgadener Land business, pure administrative effort for the September intake dropped from around twelve hours to under three — the HR administrator no longer had to maintain a single physical folder. More important than the time saving alone, though, was a different effect: for the first time, all nine apprentices had fully signed documentation in place on their first day, instead of individual documents having to be chased down over the following weeks.

Data protection is not a side issue in digital onboarding

Anyone processing the personal data of apprentices — often minors — digitally has to build in data-protection requirements from the start, not bolt them on afterwards. This particularly concerns the information obligations under Article 13 GDPR toward the data subjects or their legal guardians, and the question of how long which data may be retained. Bavaria's data protection authority, the Bayerischer Landesbeauftragter für den Datenschutz, publishes practical guidance for employers on this that is worth reading before introducing an onboarding system.

In practice this means: access rights in the HR system have to be granted granularly, so that, for example, the workshop lead does not automatically have access to health data or salary information, and retention periods must be technically enforced rather than just written into a policy. These requirements are one of the reasons we rarely build onboarding processes as an isolated form system, but as part of a considered IT consulting & digitalisation strategy that plans permission concepts and data handling in from the start.

The link to ERP and master data makes the difference

The real added value appears where onboarding data doesn't stay isolated in the HR system but flows automatically into downstream systems. At the Berchtesgadener Land business, Lyrion ERP picks up master data for new employees directly from HELITS HRIS — cost centre, time-tracking account and access rights to internal systems are created automatically as soon as the onboarding process is complete. Previously, the same information had to be typed in by hand three times: once for the personnel file, once for payroll, once for the ERP system — with a correspondingly high error rate from typos or forgotten updates.

For companies that hire a new apprentice intake every September, or simply hire new employees regularly, digital onboarding is therefore rarely a comfort project — it's a measure that lowers error rate and administrative overhead at the same time, and gives HR back the time to do what it's actually there for: the people, not the folders.