success story
World's top logistics supplier automates staffing process with Beeline
Beeline VMS automated the entire contingent staffing process. In the first year the client achieved cost savings by standardizing their hiring and management processes and implementing location-specific rate cards.
- Industry
- Logistics
- Client Since
- 2012
- Category
- Contingent Staffing
The challenge
As a third-party supplier of logistics solutions, our client manages entire distribution centers for many leading manufacturers, but it is not always privy to its clients’ strategies and planning. As a consequence, the company often has to ramp up operations quickly to meet market demands and then scale back just as quickly when the workload changes. This requires an ability to activate a highly agile workforce in multiple localities across North America.
Because each distribution center is locally managed, hiring, onboarding, management, and payment of this extended workforce had generally been done manually, which was very inefficient. In addition, the client’s corporate finance department had very little visibility into staffing costs at each facility, making oversight of the company’s entire contingent workforce nearly impossible. As a result, they turned to Beeline.
The solution
In consultation with the client’s program management team, we implemented our Vendor Management System (VMS) to automate the entire contingent staffing process, making special provisions for accommodating what was then and continues to be primarily a short-term, short-notice light industrial workforce. Among the special provisions were the creation of express workflows that allowed suppliers to submit large numbers of workers quickly and Kronos integration with frequent worker downloads, which decreased the requirement for manual timesheet edits.
Fortunately for the success of the program, Beeline VMS is highly configurable, which facilitated the creation of expedited workflows for only the job titles that required it.
The result
In the first year of our VMS’ operation, the client achieved cost savings by standardizing their hiring and management processes and implementing location-specific rate cards. Increased visibility allowed the corporate finance team to streamline their operations, including their ability to easily produce monthly reports on a more timely basis.
Today, Beeline VMS manages more than $170 million in contingent staffing spend in North America, and plans are underway to implement a new Services Procurement program to manage all statement of work (SOW)-based projects. In any given month, the VMS provides the technology and service the client needs to manage a contingent headcount of approximately 7,000 to 12,000 workers, depending on demand, allowing the client to address their customers’ highly variable and not always predictable logistics requirements.
