ChoiceOne's Success Story
ChoiceOne's operations enhanced by integrated software
Industry: Recruitment in temporary, contract, locum and permanent staff in the areas of accounting, allied health, computing/IT, education, engineering/mining/trades, legal, medical/nursing, office and admin, and sales and marketing. Including recruiting for overseas contract positions.
Headquarters: Perth, WA
Divisions: ChoiceOne, ChoiceOne MediTemp, ChoiceOne Taskforce
Staff: 30 internal
THE PROBLEM
ChoiceOne was using various stand-alone databases to handle its main client, billing, job orders and debtor information, accessed through a DOS-based front-end. General manager Scott Van Heurck said: "It was still a good system, but it just wouldn't let you get a lot of information out. It was very restricted." It also required double-entry of data into the unconnected front-end (job order) and back-end (payroll/billing) modules.
THE NEED
Van Heurck realised that ChoiceOne needed to upgrade to a suite of products designed to work together, rather than to try to make various classes of stand-alone software work together. "With a suite of integrated products, the data is all stored in one database, accessible and updateable instantly from any part of the system," Van Heurck said.
THE SOLUTION
ChoiceOne selected FastTrack's integrated suite of recruitment software, beginning with the core systems of SkillsBase and Recruitment Manager, Payroll Manager and Integrated Ledger in early 2001 and adding FastScan, WebBase and other versatile additions as they became available.
THE BENEFITS
Van Heurck has found that the flexibility and speed of a fully integrated system has helped his company better meet the needs of an increasingly technological business environment and his clients' never-ending demand for faster service. "It also greatly improves management's control over the business," he said. "The ease and the speed at which you can retrieve key data, key performance indicators, business and financial reports out of the system is excellent.
"For recruitment consultants, it gives them superior management of their contractors. They only need one centralised system to manage their workload and their client/candidate files. Being a quality assured company (ISO 9001), it makes it a lot easier to bring an integrated system into the controls of our quality assurance manual." Consultants also benefit from improved operating procedures and easy and instant access to the range of information they need to best service the needs of clients and candidates – thereby improving efficiency.
Van Heurck said that the size and mix of his staff had changed since introducing an integrated system, with fewer staff overall but with a higher percentage of recruitment consultants than previously. Businesses were getting smarter at what they did, he said, and doing the same business with fewer people, and FastTrack's integrated system was an important part of this competitiveness.
Integrated software, plus the growing variety of tasks that could be completed using it, had improved business performance, Van Heurck said. "We will never get to the paperless office, but we definitely have improved," he said. "For example, résumés are e-mailed to us, interpreted in FastScan and then stored in a central location for everybody to access through the various electronic search options. The ease and the speed at which we can process new résumés is amazing. You wouldn't have even thought about that in the old system we had."
By choosing an integrated system, Van Heurck also realised that there would be economies and efficiencies that could be gained in support and maintenance, with one provider looking after all the key components. "With a variety of suppliers, they each worry about their own little part of it and they don't really care if they disrupt the other modules. Then off they go and you are left with a bit of a mess," he said.
"With an integrated suite, it's all in the one system." Overall, Van Heurck believes the integrated system has contributed to business growth through altering the mix of business spending, with less being spent on administrative areas and support agreements and more being diverted to proactive areas such as Web site upgrades, advertising and promotion.
Van Heurck said that once a company had experienced an integrated system, it could never go back to a system that relied on import/export/update interfaces between stand-alone databases in separate systems.
"Today, we wouldn't look at a system without an integrated payroll module," Van Heurck said. "There are lots of recruitment contact management programs, but they don't have payroll and debtors integrated with it. I can't imagine ever going back to downloading information out of a contact management database and then sending it over to a stand-alone payroll system, doing your payroll there, then sending it on to a debtors module. Doing it that way these days will really have you well behind the competition."
