Lightening the load with Voyager Industrial

In Brief

Vanstomp had been managing its business with a number of disparate unlinked systems. The lack of automation meant that duplication was inevitable and the administrative overhead unnecessarily high. The implementation of Voyager Industrial has streamlined the business and led to significant savings in both time and costs. 

The Detail

Undoubtedly the most complex types of Recruitment Company to manage are those that provide itinerant workers to the agricultural and light industrial sectors. With hundreds of workers to place and many starting very short term contracts on a daily basis, the administrative workload is very onerous. To make matters worse, until recently there has been no specialist system to accommodate their needs.  Unsurprisingly therefore, Voyager Industrial is making a significant impact in this area.

One company who has been able to transform its operation through the use of Voyager Industrial is Vanstomp of Cambridge. A long established business providing short-term contract work to predominantly the agricultural sector, Vanstomp like many of its counterparts has for many years struggled to find a system that meets the diverse needs of its industry. “Our business is complex. We have to manage the placement and management of several hundred contract workers at any one time”, said Leon Jonck, Operational Manager. “It’s also not uncommon for some of these workers to have five different assignments in the space of five days.”

Without a single system to run such a business, the administrative overhead was significant; Leon continued, “Before we implemented Industrial, we were forced to use a number of database products and off-the-shelf solutions including Microsoft Excel, Axis, Office Manager and Money Manager. These products were not in any way linked, we therefore had no central system, no flexibility and we were forced to duplicate much of our data. This also meant that although we are a small company, our administrative overheads were always high.”

Significant time and cost savings

In the space of a few months, Voyager Industrial has transformed the way in which Vanstomp works. “This has made a massive difference to our business – for the first time ever, we now have all our data in one place in a system that is integrated to our back office. We are no longer forced to duplicate information and we are already seeing some significant time and cost savings. Within just one month of the implementation, we were able to release one member of our administration staff who is now concentrating on another aspect of our business. This is just the start, we foresee further administrative savings.” Leon added.

Voyager Industrial has also had a positive impact on Vanstomp’s candidates: “Before, missing timesheets were always a huge problem, now they’re not. With Industrial we have immediate visibility of any missing timesheet, so we can act quickly when the system tells us there’s a discrepancy. This means that there is far less work involved in investigating problems and more importantly, the chance of people not being paid the correct money has been reduced significantly.”

“Voyager Industrial has made a massive difference to our business” – Leon Joncks, Operational Manager, Vanstomp.

“Before choosing Industrial, we went to a number of Voyager’s competitors and found that there was nothing on the market that came close to meeting the needs of a business like ours. We needed a system that was flexible enough to cope with multiple people working for multiple clients on a weekly basis; a system that made making placements easy; a system with automatic gang timesheets; and a system that was above all user friendly and could be integrated to the back office. Industrial does all this and more, so we are delighted.”

As one of the first users of Voyager Industrial, Leon was also impressed with the implementation: “Our data conversion went without a hitch, the training was excellent and the actual implementation went very smoothly.” Naturally there were some early teething problems but within a couple of weeks these were sorted out: “We’ve found the Voyager support team to be excellent; they answer the phone quickly and we’ve found their remote access tool to be invaluable.”

For Leon, one of the key attributes of Industrial is that it’s intuitive and very user friendly: “We’ve been able to pick it up really quickly and certain aspects of the system are transforming our business. The way in which Industrial manages placements and then automatically produces timesheets that we can then key directly into the payroll is fantastic – just this alone has made our everyday working life that much easier.” The ability to generate automatic SMS messaging has also proved to be a real bonus: “We have to notify a lot of our people on a daily basis; this feature is great.”

Leon is excited about the future: “It’s still early days and we seem to be saving more and more time every week we use the system. There are also other features of Industrial that we have yet to use - I have no doubt that the system’s ability to deal with transport and accommodation costs will prove to be very useful in the future.  All in all,” Leon concluded: “we are very, very pleased with everything.”

How we made a difference at Vanstomp

For too long, this sector of the Recruitment Industry has been neglected, that’s why we developed Voyager Industrial. Vanstomp was suffering from typical symptoms: a complex business supported by a number of unlinked databases; a requirement to duplicate data; and an unnecessarily high administrative overhead.

Voyager Industrial has made a real difference because it has enabled Vanstomp to hold all their data in one place, avoid duplication and integrate their front office with their back office. This has led to, in their words: “massive time savings” and “a lot of administration simply going away”.  It has been suggested that the administration saving may well be as high as 50% - and when the majority of your staff work in administration, that’s very significant…

http://www.vanstomp.co.uk/