The key to effective workforce management
Rick Stoor, MD of Templa, explains the advantages to be gained if your workforce management software forms part of your integrated contract management system, rather than existing as unconnected standalone applications.
The fact that just about every leading UK cleaning and FM contractor is now using some form of integrated business management software suggests that their benefits in managing the complexity of contract cleaning are now well understood.
Having said that, if there’s one area where an integrated system really needs to pay its way in order to return your overall investment, it is in managing your frontline workforce. It’s absolutely vital to maximise the benefit of software in this area. After all, your frontline labour represents around 80% of total revenue, meaning that in today’s world of ultra-thin net profit margins, if you overspend your labour budget by as little as 5% in a period you can pretty much wipe out your net profit.
So, if you can protect your valuable labour budget whilst streamlining the administration needed to do so, it’s surely a win-win situation.
Why choose integrated workforce
management? To answer this you must first appreciate the significant gulf in effectiveness between standalone ‘workforce management software’ that just handles scheduling or time and attendance, and integrated workforce management software that manages every single aspect of your employees’ activity, all the way from joining your company to working on client contracts and interacting with your HR and admin teams.
What do I mean? Well, as the diagram shows, there are fourteen common tasks or applications that between them cover the six key areas of workforce management: new staff acquisition; operational deployment in the business; payment; communications; integration with client billing; budgetary control and analysis.
It’s not rocket science to see that not only do these applications use the same data, but that data also needs to be able to pass between them easily in order for processes to run smoothly.
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Perhaps the best example of this is the very central task of ensuring compliance with contracted hours and measuring actual pay against budgeted pay each period – a task that occupies a great deal of management time for all cleaning contractors. In an integrated contract management system, it is the core data on employees, hours and start times at each site, stored on your central database of contracts, that feeds and drives both the time and attendance system and your timesheet system, as well as updating actual versus budgeted expenditure.
Data passes seamlessly between all four elements, giving operations managers, payroll and finance staff real-time insight as to where contracted hours are being delivered on, over or under budget. Contrast this with a standalone workforce management solution where hours and shifts must be keyed into separate systems – hours rostered, timesheet control, time and attendance software and budgetary control – and where reconciliation is provided only at the end of
the pay period, when data is exported from the T&A to the timesheets and on to budget spreadsheets, in most cases far too late to take action to correct
variances.
Benefits of integration In an integrated system, the benefits of
seamless data sharing apply in a similar way
to any number of workforce-related activities that involve data gathering, data keying, document processing, and analysis. Think onboarding new employees, or deploying staff on one-off work with subsequent payment of staff and invoicing of clients.
The simple fact is that if you manage workforce-related tasks by exporting or manually copying data from one unconnected software application to another, and monitoring the outcome with multiple spreadsheets, it will take you longer, you will be more likely to make mistakes, and you will stand a greater chance of overspending what is by some degree your biggest budget.
www.templacms.co.uk twitter.com/TomoCleaning
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