Move Ahead Media is a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, with a distributed team that includes remote staff in the Philippines. Over the past 16 years, the agency has expanded to a broad suite of services — paid media, social, web design, and multilingual content — supporting clients across Thailand, Australia, and Southeast Asia.
"Omni is a platform I would recommend to anyone looking for a multi-country HR system. It's easy to use, saves us a lot of time, and provides very good service."
When Jonathan Malcolm joined Move Ahead Media as Head of HR & Talent Acquisition, the agency had around 36 employees and a patchwork of tools managing different parts of the HR function. As headcount doubled, the team needed something that could keep pace — centralizing employee data, simplifying document management, and protecting sensitive records under Thailand's tightening PDPA requirements. They began using Omni HR to streamline their HR operations into one, centralized HRIS system.
How Omni Adds Value to Move Ahead Media
Cutting the Cost of HR Operations
The Challenge
Before Omni, Move Ahead Media was running several separate platforms across HR, time off management, and access control — each with its own cost and its own learning curve. As the team grew, so did the overhead. The tools weren't designed to work together, which meant data lived in multiple places and the finance and HR teams had to manually reconcile information across systems. For a team with growth ambitions and a three-person HR function, the cost was both financial and the hours spent chasing data that should have been in one place.
Omni's Solution
By consolidating HR, time off, document management, payslips, and workflow automation onto Omni, Move Ahead Media was able to retire several platforms and consolidate their tech stack. The team now manages the bulk of their HR operations — from onboarding to leave tracking to performance reviews — through a single, centralized platform. As Malcolm explains, "We've gone from three or four different systems to two, and that's because Omni offers time off, performance, documents, payslips, and workflows in one place. It’s been a gamechanger."
The Results
The reduction in platforms translated directly into savings. Malcolm estimates the agency has cut its monthly HR tech spend by around 50% — a meaningful impact for a growing mid-sized business. "Omni is a great value," he notes, "you get a very, very good service." Beyond the cost line, the consolidation has freed the HR team from managing multiple vendor relationships and the coordination overhead that came with them. That freed-up capacity has gone back into the work that actually moves the business — faster onboarding, tighter compliance, and an HR function that can grow the team from 36 to 60 without growing the headcount required to manage them.
Simplifying a Fragmented Tech Stack
The Challenge
Running HR across separate tools for time off, employee records, and access control meant that People data was never in one place for the Move Ahead team. The team juggled different logins, different permission structures, and different workflows — each platform solving one problem while creating friction with the others. For a team of three managing 60+ employees, every extra system added to the administrative load. "We had a door system, a time off system, a HR system — we've gone from three or four different systems to two. Having it all in one place just makes everything easier."
Omni's Solution
Omni brought the core HR functions together under one roof. Time off management, performance reviews, payslips, document management, and workflow automation are all accessible from a single platform — including via the Omni mobile app, which the Move Ahead team relies on for real-time access from anywhere."I'm not on my laptop and I can just check the app — it's all viewable." Whether it's approving a leave request on the go, pulling up a payslip detail ahead of a director query, or reviewing a task completion status without opening a laptop, the app means HR decisions don't have to wait until someone is at their desk. Access controls allow HR to ensure each role sees only what it needs to: individual employees view their own profiles, managers see their team's leave and performance, and HR and directors retain full oversight.
The Results
Move Ahead Media went from three to four separate systems down to two, everything HR-related now lives in Omni. The result is a simpler operational footprint, cleaner data, and a team that spends less time context switching and navigating between platforms and more time supporting the business. Malcolm's view on Omni reflects that: "Everything Omni said they were going to do, they've done. They really deliver on their promise — that's not always a given with software."
Centralized and Compliant Documents
The Challenge
Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act enforcement has been steadily tightening since it became a live compliance obligation in 2022. For Move Ahead Media’s HR team PDPA compliance is a core priority and its adherence is non-negotiable for their HR system.
This meant beyond having the right policies in place, the team needed clean and easily manageable access controls and logs. Who accessed a document, when, and with what authority. Where a record is stored, and for how long. Whether sensitive data is visible only to those with a legitimate reason to see it.
Before Omni, Move Ahead Media's employee documentation was fragmented across multiple folders, email threads, and shared drives. A new starter's contract might be in one location, their offer letter in another, and their signed acceptance buried in someone's inbox. "There's been three or four different folders — the contracts, the offer letters, the qualifications, the employee database," Malcolm recalls. While their employee data was protected, it was stored in a system that was increasingly difficult to prove compliant.
Omni's Solution
For Malcolm, the shift started with something that sounds simple: knowing that when a contract was sent, it was signed, and that it was filed where it needed to be — without anyone having to chase it. "The minute you send that contract and it's signed electronically, it goes straight into their folder within Omni." he explains. That kind of certainty — task logged, document filed, access controlled — is exactly what PDPA compliance requires in practice.
Omni's document management platform gave Move Ahead the structure to match. Every employee's documents live under their own profile, accessible only to those with the right permissions: employees see their own records, managers see what's relevant to their team, and HR and directors hold full access. Each of those boundaries is logged. For a team managing contracts, work permits, bank details, ID documents, and certification records across Thailand and the Philippines — both active PDPA enforcement markets — having a system that enforces those controls by design helps ensure they remain compliant.
The Results
The shift from a fragmented folder structure to a centralised, access-controlled, audit-logged system transformed how Move Ahead Media handles data compliance. "PDPA here has gotten very strong," Malcolm notes. "Ultimately it was about protection — is it locked, is it protected, who can see what accounts, who can see what profiles. Omni answers all of those compliance questions." The team now manages more than 20 document types — contracts, onboarding packs, training qualifications, certification records, bank details, and identification documents — from a single location, with access permissions that mirror organisational structure and update as it changes. Payslips are downloadable by employees on demand via the mobile app, removing the need for HR to field individual requests while keeping the access log intact.
Built to Scale with Omni
Over two years with Omni, Move Ahead Media has transformed how its HR function operates — moving from a fragmented collection of tools to a single platform that handles the full employee lifecycle. The agency has cut their HR tech spend by around half, reduced their tech stack by half, and centralised their document and compliance workflows in a way that upholds PDPA requirements and scales with its headcount.
With continued growth on the horizon, Move Ahead Media is already exploring Omni's multi-country payroll capabilities as the agency moves toward hybrid and remote working arrangements. "As we evolve, payroll with Omni is an avenue we’re interested in exploring," Malcolm notes. That's what Move Ahead Media found in Omni — not just a tool that solved today's problems, but one they're already thinking about for what comes next.
Ready to simplify your HR tech stack and scale with confidence? Book a demo to see how Omni can help your team do more with less.
