Integrated Group Success Story

FastTrack the answer to Integrated Group's recruitment system needs.

Industry: Industrial recruitment and labour hire agency

Headquarters: WA

Locations: 22 offices Australia-wide

Revenue: $300 million (2002/03)

Staff: 300 full-time staff, approx 5000 weekly temp payroll

The business impact

Integrated Group's recruitment business grew rapidly, as did the number of locations from which it operated around the country. Each office operated its own separate computer system, with stand-alone recruitment database. Payroll information was dispatched to a central payroll office by various methods and re-keyed into the payroll system. There were no state-wide or national integrated databases covering the day-to-day work and operations of the company.

Andrew Sanders, systems operations manager with Integrated Group, said the first software the company had installed to manage its recruitment business was Tracker (unrelated to FastTrack). In its original form it was a generic sales and contact management software, not a recruitment-specific application. "We heavily customised it and made it work very much for us in the early days," Sanders said.

But as Integrated Group grew and opened multiple offices in each state, the system's limitations became apparent as it could not be used in conjunction with a single database that connected all offices in a state, or nationally. That meant, for example, that recruitment consultants could only search their own office database when seeking candidates to fill positions.

"After Tracker, we embarked on a fairly ambitious program of trying to write our own software," Sanders said. "We had heavily customised our existing system and we wanted to keep some of that functionality. There was also a desire, a perception, that we could keep it as our own winning edge."

The software that emerged wasn't bad, Sanders said, but neither was it reliable. And with only two people involved in writing the software, it was not a core business for Integrated. "We just weren't able to keep up to speed," Sanders said. "I found it extremely frustrating. While there were some nice little bells and whistles contained in what we had, it just really wasn't going to work for us. We came to that realisation after 12 months of trying to get it off the ground. That's when we thought 'Let's have a look at an off-the-shelf product that's specifically written for the recruitment industry'."

The business need

Integrated Group's primary need was for an application that enabled it to consolidate the multiple, disparate branch databases into a single national database that was also fully integrated across all functions in its recruitment business: front end, payroll, billing, and accounting. This would eliminate the huge amount of re-keying and rework taking place. A secondary need was to create more synergy among multiple offices within a state, enabling them to recruit through the widest possible pool of candidates instead of just the candidates of a single office.

The solution

FastTrack's Enterprise suite is fully integrated. However, many software solutions are marketed using the terms 'integrated' and 'interfaced' interchangeably to describe how a suite of products works together, even though they are quite different types of architecture.

Sanders said the FastTrack suite was chosen because it offered a truly integrated – not interfaced – solution across all areas of the business. "That was the most compelling reason it was selected," Sanders said. The system operates from one central database, not many databases interfaced together. "The other factor is that FastTrack is designed to operate on a wide area network, which meant that for the first time all branches would be able to use the same database at the same time."

Dealing with FastTrack also gave Sanders some perspective on the development of a software application. "I remember walking into FastTrack's building in Melbourne and seeing a floor of people working on the product," he said. "Compare that to the two people we had, and that put things in perspective for us."

Integrated Group also made use of FastTrack's process management review services to assist with a smooth implementation. Sanders said it was an extensive and rigorous process. "It was excellent," he said. "We would have been lost without FastTrack's expertise in the process to be undertaken – the testing, the setups, and the ways to go about the implementation."

Integrated Group found that the off-the-shelf versions of FastTrack's products met the company's needs well. Sanders said there was excitement and relief in just the basics of stable software: system reliability and the availability of expert support.

Integrated Group had a few initial client and industrial sector-specific requirements that FastTrack was able to accommodate, "but it was a very good fit", Sanders said. "It was everything that we envisaged."

After 18 months of operation Sanders believed both Integrated Group and FastTrack had a deeper understanding of the business and how FastTrack's applications mapped to it. He expected the second round of specialist enhancements, which would include occupational health and safety and a more tailored candidate registration process, to be more mature and particularly beneficial to Integrated Group's recruitment business.

Integrated Group found that FastTrack's staff had a good grasp of what was required in the recruitment industry, but also found them willing to learn new and specific things from a recruiter with a heavy industrial focus. FastTrack and Integrated have maintained a strong relationship since the system implementation, building a partnership based on understanding of business capabilities, future growth needs and information sharing.

The benefits

Sanders said the benefits of FastTrack's applications became more apparent after 12 months of consolidating procedures and practices to ensure correct and optimised usage. "And there are certainly a lot more things I want to get out of it once we use its full functionality," Sanders said.

Sanders said the most obvious benefits Integrated Group had achieved were:

• A "quantum leap" in the availability and quality of management information nationally. With a single database covering all offices and front- and back-end functions, management now has easy and instant access to up-to-the-minute data about the recruitment business.
• A greater transparency of information, so that "the right hand knows what the left hand is doing", Sanders said. Information such as national accounts and branch-specific information can be accessed immediately, improving management's ability to manage and control the business.
• Elimination of double-handling of data. Once client information has been entered into the system it is available through all parts of the system, front and back end.
• System reliability. The company's day-to-day operations are no longer interrupted by system crashes and error messages.
• A decrease in staff involved in payroll processing from 16 to 11, even while the business continued to grow.

Integrated Group's training manager (west coast), Justin Fletcher, said that the main advantage of the FastTrack system was that "everything is connected" – from the frontend, to the middle payroll and billing function, then through to back-end accounting. Combined with the extra features available through FastTrack, Fletcher said that the system had enhanced the productivity of recruitment consultants.

"The procedure of linking a candidate to a particular job order is extremely easy, it's just one double-click," Fletcher said. "In the previous system we had to run a macro [a process] that probably took a good minute or more to perform. Another big advantage we have found is the ability to link résumés to candidate details. That's a big function for us. We couldn't do it before; now, all our e-mail résumés
are getting attached, as are licences and trade certificates and so on."

Fletcher was also pleased with FastTrack's reporting ability. "We can basically access any information we like out of FastTrack," he said.

Integrated Group's senior financial accountant, Linda Benson, oversees the payroll office. She said that for payroll staff, one of the biggest advantages of FastTrack was that branch staff could now access the payroll system to answer basic pay queries from temps, thereby greatly reducing telephone inquiries coming to the payroll office.

"It has really improved customer service, because instead of getting handballed through five people, the consultants can answer the query immediately," Benson said. "The fact that it is Windows-based makes it a lot easier for consultants to use. It's user friendly and it's more flexible."

Benson was also pleased with the system's reporting capabilities – "some of the reports that have been written for us are fantastic" – and found that functions such as reprinting time sheets and invoices and exporting data for manipulation in the primary accounting package and other programs was much easier.

Benson said the FastTrack PayMail module – which enables payslips to be emailed to staff – was "brilliant". "It is just one of the best things that we could have got and it will end up saving us a lot of money," she said. "It will end up being one of our biggest efficiency gains because temps get their payslip that day rather than in the mail two days later. If there is something not right or they want to query, then it can be fixed the very next day," she said.

Andrew Sanders, in summing up, said: "FastTrack is definitely the way forward for our workforce division, with its wide area network capabilities, national database, reliability, and upgrades that will move with the times and be in tune with the industry."