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Optimizing the Modern Workforce Supply Chain: Unleashing the Power of VMS Integrations for Staffing Agencies
174 Plays1 year ago
Within the staffing industry, the emergence of managed service providers (MSPs) and vendor management systems (VMS) has sparked debate, with many seeing them as adversaries to traditional staffing practices. However, a paradigm shift driven by labor cost optimization strategies, originally developed for complex healthcare systems, is now fueling the widespread adoption of MSPs and VMS interfaces among employers across all industries. As a staffing agency, it's crucial to understand the risks and opportunities presented by the modern workforce supply chain.
In this episode of Avionté Digital Edge, Chris Ryan, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Avionté, sits down with Tim Jackson, Vice President of Tech And Operations for Elevation Talent Group, to discuss how to apply the same principles of supply chain management to a modern workforce to ensure quality, continuity, and cost, as well as what it means for the modern staffing agency that needs to operate within a modern workforce management system.
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Transcript
Adoption of MSPs and VMS in Industries
00:00:00
Speaker
Within the staffing industry, managed service providers and vendor management systems are sometimes viewed as adversaries to modern staffing.
00:00:09
Speaker
But new paradigms around labor cost optimization, originally developed for complex healthcare systems, are driving widespread adoption of MSPs and VMS interfaces among employers across all industries. If you are a staffing agency, what are the risks and opportunities created by the modern workforce supply chain?
00:00:36
Speaker
Welcome to the Aviante Digital Edge, a podcast series that explores the digital transformation of staffing and contingent employment.
Introduction of Key Speakers
00:00:44
Speaker
My name is Chris Ryan, and I'm the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer for Aviante. If you run a staffing agency, you don't think a lot about supply chains, but maybe you should. When we think about supply chains, we think about something tangible, like a car.
00:01:02
Speaker
or all the parts that go into a car. Your engine could be made in Canada, your tires in France. The electronic chips could come from Malaysia and so on. A well-designed supply chain optimizes for cost and quality. The thing is, if the chain breaks, your product may not get to market. Back
Supply Chain Management in Workforce
00:01:22
Speaker
in 2020, a shortage of electronic chips forced automobile manufacturers to idle their production lines.
00:01:29
Speaker
But what happens when your supply chain is not parts but people? Contingent labor can drive 30 to 50% of total human capital costs at a large employer. Can you apply the same principles of supply chain management to a modern workforce to ensure quality, continuity and cost? And what does it mean for the modern staffing agency that needs to operate within a modern workforce management system?
00:01:56
Speaker
With me to explore this further is Tim Jackson, Vice President of Tech and Operations for Elevation Talent Group and a Senior Consultant at Newberry Partners and Principal at PPT Partners. Tim is one of the foremost experts on healthcare staffing and human capital management for the healthcare industry.
00:02:16
Speaker
Tim's expertise comes from direct operating experience in staffing and as a managed service provider, as well as acting in an advisory capacity to employers, MSPs, and staffing agencies. Tim recently wrote a blog entitled Perspective, Viewing Labor as a Supply Chain. And I have to say, I was intrigued. So Tim, let's get into it.
Healthcare Staffing and MSPs
00:02:42
Speaker
First,
00:02:43
Speaker
You know, tell me a little about your professional experience, Tim, and in particular, what got you interested in human capital and workforce management? I mean, how do you get into healthcare staffing? Great question, Chris, and thank you for the opportunity here.
00:02:57
Speaker
You know, I got into healthcare staffing from my involvement with a professional staffing firm, the Advanced Group in Chicago. I had joined them after a 20 year career in finance and technology. And they had a really unique business model in the healthcare staffing space. Essentially they were committed to running MSPs and this firm.
00:03:20
Speaker
had twelve msp's in the chicago metro market we dominated that market as the msp provider and in doing that we essentially demonstrated how a staffing firm could make a lot of money doing that and at the same time serve their clients and essentially at the end of the day raise patient care.
00:03:41
Speaker
So it sounds like if you wanted to provide healthcare temporary workers in Chicago, they were going to work with your organization and you exclusively. Is that fair? That is fair. If anybody's listening who's familiar with the MSP model, as you cited at the opening bell, they can be quite controversial because of course an MSP
00:04:05
Speaker
You can be disruptive to traditional staffing supplier relationships but
00:04:12
Speaker
it was my involvement with the MSP process that got me into workforce management because in trying to meet the needs of these clients, and later on, this firm got sold to Medical Staffing Network, which eventually evolved into cross country. I got exposed to several large systems across the country. And as we talked about the role of the MSP, we understood better what was required to meet the needs of
00:04:40
Speaker
large hospitals and large hospital systems. And they, of course, were practicing a level of workforce management and had been using least cost optimization models, which I found to be really well-developed from the advisory board, which was a healthcare consulting firm. And basically, their models were very well-articulated about what it meant to have the right amount of staff and essentially explained
00:05:09
Speaker
how you can actually use temporary labor in a staffing model for a hospital and not only maintain patient care standards, but actually reduce your costs and actually improve your own workforce by essentially reducing some of the pressure on
00:05:30
Speaker
your incumbent staff to pick up missed shifts and to pick up shifts that were difficult to fill or cover gaps in skills across a period of time with travel resources. So it was this exposure to hospital systems that I said, okay, there's a science here. And the labor supply chain kind of emerged out of that as a model for workforce management and healthcare.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah.
Complexities in Healthcare Labor Supply Chains
00:05:54
Speaker
So I'm just curious, what is it about healthcare? Is it that the fact that labor is constrained? Is it the credentials that are required for healthcare positions? Is it cost and quality? Is it the way they're organized? What is it about healthcare that lends itself to early adoption of an MSP model?
00:06:11
Speaker
all of the above. But most importantly, I think the cost of failure is so high in health care, where if you don't have the right staff on the floor, you actually put patient care at risk. And for many hospitals, that means you can't accept new patients. There are models where census is rising at a hospital. If you don't have the labor to support it, you can't take those patients in. And that ultimately kind of
00:06:39
Speaker
obviously disrupts the financial model of the hospital, whether it's a for-profit or not for profit. So ultimately operational continuity is critical to the value proposition of what your delivery. Absolutely. And because hospital delivery essentially is a
00:06:56
Speaker
is just amazing, as all of us know, experienced it, conversion of talented patient care with amazing technology that lets us perform important critical thing in our all our lives. Yeah, yeah.
00:07:12
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about supply chain. And you wrote this blog and I'm really curious, what exactly do you mean when you talk about labor as a supply chain? I mean, what is a supply chain? How does a labor supply chain differ from the traditional supply chain that we might use for products? Thank you, Chris. That to me is a right way to frame the conversation.
00:07:41
Speaker
The fundamentals of a supply chain begin with the concept of demand planning. And this is your production plan. This is your service delivery plan. And our ability to do demand planning, to then have sourcing supply pipelines, understand what substitutes are available, and understand the consequence of supply disruptions. To me, those are the elements that we start with.
00:08:09
Speaker
I'll go even further. So if you've ever worked in a industrial process, you know that there's something called receiving operations and the truck backs up and goods are taken off a truck and inspected. Well, we don't do that when it comes to people, but we surely have an onboarding process that is analogous to that. And so if you take the material supply chain and just array it across the whiteboard,
00:08:34
Speaker
right below it, you could write the labor version of that process. So it goes from demand planning to all the procurement processes. Anybody who's in this business knows how kind of difficult it is to become a supplier to a health care enterprise. And it's not just because the competition's there, it's because the bar gets set high in terms of having you enter
00:09:00
Speaker
hospitals or health systems supply chain. They want you to conform to their labor supply chain. Whether they articulate it as a labor supply chain or not is not really the point.
00:09:10
Speaker
Point is that there is a supply chain there. The concepts associated with direct materials where you talk about the three-way match. If I was selling you tires for your auto plant, you would have a purchase order, you'd have a receiving document from the warehouse, and you'd have an invoice. No three things have to match before I pay you. Well, the same thing happens in staffing. We've got these time sheets, we've got invoices, we've got schedules. All those things need to be
00:09:37
Speaker
validated before the AP person releases the payment. So those concepts are there. And finally, the last piece in supply chain for me, which is I think resonates should resonate with all of us, is managing your inventory, wear and tear.
00:09:53
Speaker
You know, it's one thing to talk about it in the context of a physical good, but in people don't often like, oh, people aren't inventory. Well, you know, in this context, they are. And we need to be cognizant of.
00:10:08
Speaker
the burdens we put on the people, the wear and tear, the job plays stress. The newspapers were filled with stories associated with COVID issues related to healthcare, and those weren't just because
00:10:24
Speaker
of critical ICU cases. They were there because there were critical ICU cases that were stacked and stacked and we didn't have enough labor in that unit to take care of them. So healthcare workers who were used to delivering the best care possible for 10 patients had to deliver adequate care for 20 patients or sometimes
00:10:44
Speaker
not as adequate care for 30 patients. That wears on people. And so you have to pay attention to the inventory, not only in a physical supply chain, but as well as in a labor supply chain.
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah.
Candidate Inventory and Client Demands
00:10:58
Speaker
Yeah. No. And the funny thing now is that when it comes to labor, we have been so used to having a large pool of fungible labor for so long that many people in staffing haven't necessarily thought in terms of, you know, the inventory of talent that is available or, you know, what is your bench? Because ordinarily, you know, a bench or a candidate pool is expensive to maintain. But in a large staffing operation, you have to maintain that inventory at the right level or you can't deliver
00:11:28
Speaker
uh, deliver services. So if I hear you correctly, you're basically saying the supply chain, whether it's people or whether it's products, all of the same principles apply. And you are managing cost, quality, the point of requisition and, and, and receivable. And you're managing your inventory constantly. There really is no difference. It costs time.
00:11:55
Speaker
timeliness and quality are the three things that need to be managed in a physical supply chain as well as a labor supply chain. Those are the variables that we as managers get to work with and the principles of just in time,
00:12:14
Speaker
you know, supply, apply to labor supply, too. We have we have float pools, we have a queue of people that are being onboarded this month for deployment next month. We've got travelers rolling off that we're going to bring back our people on. There's just all sorts of complexity, if you would, to this. And we didn't even talk when we talk about quality, you break quality down a lot of different ways to skills. And then
00:12:40
Speaker
that can break down just not only the clinical skills where we're laying hands on patients, but as well as the technical skills associated with all the hardware that runs that exists in hospitals.
00:12:51
Speaker
and having our staff, especially, you know, primary care nurses being able to deal with the EMR systems that are out there in terms of the, you know, is it Epic? Is it Cerner? Is it McKesson's solution? And am I able to use those tools quickly? Every system is different, but if you know how to use Epic at one hospital with some orientation, you're going to be successful at another Epic hospital.
00:13:16
Speaker
the jump between Cerner and Epic might take a little bit more training. But those are things that matter when it comes down to onboarding. And frankly, the cost of bringing someone in. So you'll see on a requisition from a client hospital, you know, very detailed specifications about their the the healthcare workers technical competencies in in the EMR systems as well as certain diagnostic tools.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah. So how does the concept of a supply chain for labor really address the challenges and demands of a workforce? And I'm going to jump to this question right away. A lot of our listeners aren't necessarily in healthcare staffing. They may be in another part of staffing. And so they're wondering, oh, well, Tim is talking about healthcare staffing. I don't have to listen now because I do clerical and light industrial staffing or I do hospitality staffing.
00:14:09
Speaker
or I do professional staffing, why does the staffing industry need to pay attention to what has been happening in healthcare and what is the underlying lesson there? So, great question, Chris. I don't have the same firsthand experience that I do in healthcare as an operator, but I do see that as a consultant. The role of supply chain in the light industrial space
00:14:33
Speaker
And that includes not only assembly, but warehouse operations is very clear. You know, you look at seasonal variation in product demand from holidays to, you know, just to, you know, summer, winter, holiday spending, those models all have
00:14:50
Speaker
a production model that preceded delivery to the consumer. And that production included not only materials, but labor. And so that demand planning, Macy's needs, 3,000 people available to them in the Chicago northern suburbs to deploy across all their stores.
00:15:07
Speaker
Well, that's a demand requirement that needs to be modeled. And I, as a staffing firm, if I'm used to providing retail support in that market, I know I better be building my queue. There's a concept that we hear from all the ATSs, their ability to group talent and create these curated lists of skilled talent that's ready to go to work. I, as a staffing operator, need to have that same mentality regardless of the niche I work in.
00:15:37
Speaker
Now, some of them are very small, but some of those pools need to be big enough because if I'm doing hospitality, I'm doing energy workers, construction workers, some of the skilled trades like industrial, assembly, warehouse, and something as simple as substitute teachers. There's a seasonality to that demand. We know that certain things happen
00:16:00
Speaker
in schools around the gaps. And if I'm the staffing firm running the substitute teacher solution for a school district, I need to be managing that and building my queue. And that building my queue is a function of labor supply chain. Workforce management is not new.
Data-Driven Workforce Planning
00:16:19
Speaker
Good managers, good operators have been doing it for years. We're just trying to elevate the game. And why do we want to do that? Because we can learn something from the direct material guys. The direct material people are focused on metrics.
00:16:30
Speaker
are focused on data and allowing our workforce planning models to be informed by data is to me the kind of the threshold. And when you cross that threshold, all of a sudden now you're having a more substantive conversation. And this is a long answer to an earlier question. I want to be able to have that conversation with my client. I want to understand what his problem is and be able to talk about it in the context of data. And the minute I do that,
00:17:00
Speaker
I've elevated myself above the competition. I'm now more engaged with them in talking the language that they understand, that their planners understand, that their CFO and their COO understand. And the minute I do that, I've now differentiated myself from a lot of staffing firms. So the more staffing firms that are able to talk about
00:17:22
Speaker
the data, if you would, of the supply chain. It goes beyond just simple fill rates and time to fill, but it talks about speed orientation, perfect order processes, the NPS scores that we get off people in terms of their work success on a particular unit. I mean, there's just all sorts of
00:17:41
Speaker
data that I as a producer, if I was doing machines and doing materials, I'd have all this data coming to me because I'd have sensors on my computers. Well, these are people, so it's a little harder, but just because it's hard, it doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do it. So, Tim, you know, thinking about this, it sounds like if you're a staffing agency and you want to be a strategic partner to your employers, the first and most important thing you need to do is understand their demand cycle.
00:18:11
Speaker
and understanding their demand, anticipating it, and then working backwards. So to your example, if Macy's needs 4,000 workers in North Suburban Chicago in November, that means that the staffing partners that are working with them would need to know this perhaps back in June.
00:18:30
Speaker
would presumably be starting to assemble candidate pools for the right fit of people. And they would even take into account that it might take two weeks or three weeks to train a retail clerk in the right situation. But ultimately, it's all about having the demand data and being able to work with it. Demand data and then
00:18:58
Speaker
particularly if you're a staffing professional in your niche, you know what the delivery aspect is. You know what happens with, if I put like in the hospitality business, I had a client who did that work and they would, they'd have an event as part of a trade
00:19:17
Speaker
they'd have to put 100 people into an event. Well, that meant they had to actually have 125 signed up because they knew they'd have 25 call-offs and no shows. And so I know something about my data and I'm transparent with you, the customer, about these processes so you understand how difficult my job is. There's a reason you use staffing firms. And it's not because, you know,
00:19:45
Speaker
It's a casual thing. You're using them because they provide a value and that service of understanding these temporary labor markets and understanding the participants in it brings value to the firm because now as a firm, I'm able to deliver and provide services to my customer and my customer doesn't really care that I solved it with temporary labor or not. They just want it to be solved. Now, just a quick jump to healthcare staffing.
00:20:11
Speaker
That's
Hospital and Staffing Agency Collaboration
00:20:12
Speaker
one of the friction areas that over time has gotten better, but still has a ways to go.
00:20:17
Speaker
Because healthcare delivery, people, if you go to a lot of hospitals, you'll see a badge and the badge will be, I'm an employee, but if the badge is a different color, they're an agency people. And so there's certain workplace dynamics that support agency people in healthcare. Some hospitals do it better than others. And the better the hospital engages in a
00:20:42
Speaker
professional conversation with the supply chain around labor, the better outcomes we get because our workers land on the ground, they have better experiences, they get orientated faster. They're never fully part of the team because they know that. But at the end of the day, they're part of a patient care team.
00:21:04
Speaker
for the seven to seven shift on Saturday. And that means they've got to take care of that patient and meet the patient's family face to face and be part of that solution. So the more we're able to indoctrinate that group into the customs and the services of a particular client, the better served everybody is including the patient.
00:21:25
Speaker
Got it. Got it. Yeah. So it sounds like the hospital and the temporary agencies that serve that hospital really need to be working hand in glove if they're going to get the right kind of outcome. And even to the point of impacting quality of care. Absolutely. And it doesn't matter.
00:21:44
Speaker
Healthcare, I can speak to some of the tactical issues there, but it works for every niche. There's not a single niche in our business talent sector, if you would, that doesn't have these dimensions. It's just a matter of being able to talk to the detail of it. And the more we as a staffing provider are engaging with that client at the margin on these conversations, the better, frankly, the better product we as a staffing firm
00:22:12
Speaker
creating and are able to talk about and ultimately sell. I mean, Chris, if you were the CEO of a firm or that running HR for a chain of fast food operators here in Chicago, I'd be talking to you about the ability to have poop land in your workforce and be effective members of your team week over week. And, you know, we would have conversations about what works and doesn't work. And, you know, when we've had wins, we'd talk about those and we'd have
00:22:42
Speaker
pragmatic conversations about, well, we don't get it right. The days of terminating temp for instant like that is, I think it's gone. There's more conversation now around, hey, what did we do wrong? Maybe we have some accountability for the success of this worker in our orientation, in our onboarding processes.
00:23:02
Speaker
I think it's a great step. Let's talk a little bit about some of the components and stages that are involved in managing a labor supply chain. If I'm an employer, what is it exactly that I'm going to need in order to build a supply chain? Where does an MSP or a VMS technology fit into labor supply chain management?
00:23:25
Speaker
Yeah, as much as people hate to hear it sometimes, I don't think there's a lot of substitutes for a good VMS system, whether you structure that VMS system inside an MSP relationship or you, the ultimate employer, if you were a hospital or if you were running the car assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina,
00:23:51
Speaker
you can bet that there is a VMS system in that. Whether you have an MSP or not is another conversation because you as the employer could run the VMS, essentially in source that MSP process. So the VMS is the key and the VMS plays obviously a key role as a procurement system for labor. And that procurement system, I have a bar
00:24:18
Speaker
reach for qualifying as a supplier. There's certain all sorts of benchmarks around that. There's agreed to pricing. There's agreed to quality standards. There's agreed to timeliness. And these VMS systems provide me, the employer, a way to establish those criteria and communicate them to my supply chain, to my suppliers, and use that back and forth to say, well, what's working? What's not working?
00:24:47
Speaker
If you look at well i think you know good workforce management systems you're gonna see there's there are suppliers who've embraced this process and are able to use the technology appropriately and that using the technology means not only getting my account set up but being able to.
00:25:06
Speaker
get requisitions from the VMS system in a timely manner, turn around submittals and starts back into the VMS properly and ultimately involved in quality feedback around workers, as well as
00:25:21
Speaker
of course, timesheets and time reporting. So Tim, let me push on this a little bit. If I'm a staffing agency, and we certainly hear this from customers occasionally, the VMS is often seen as the enemy or as a way that an employer is going to try and shave a couple points of margin off of my fees as a staffing agency. I'd rather work around a VMS than work with a VMS.
00:25:50
Speaker
Um, but if I hear you, you're saying the VMS is kind of inevitable. And, um, you know, broadly speaking, more and more employers are going to adopt VMS. Is that your point of view? That's, that would be my, my view. And
Importance of VMS in Modern Staffing
00:26:02
Speaker
I, as a staffing operator, I hated it when I had a direct employer relationship and a VMS system come in, because I did have a preferred relationship with hiring managers. I had direct access to them. So the sweet spot for a VMS system is to not break that
00:26:19
Speaker
that hiring manager visibility and to allow the system to gather data, not be a blocker for certain staffing firms. So now I'm on my soapbox, Chris, for a moment. But when I hear of a staffing firm that is using their VMS and always taking the first person submitted, to me that they're making a mistake. There needs to be a quality differentiation. Hiring managers,
00:26:49
Speaker
who are putting people to work, especially in healthcare, where the cost of failure is high. I can't afford to bring someone in and have them not work out. I want them to work out. So I need to do some level of screening. So are you putting forth good enough talent? I need to be able to review those people. So if I've got a submittal, I'm just not taking the first one. I'm gonna look at an array of people and I'm gonna make sure I gave myself time, time
00:27:16
Speaker
dimension of supply chain to look at these people, so I'm not in a crisis situation. Now, in the context of a per diem float pool operation, that time issue becomes
00:27:30
Speaker
It's really short. It becomes three hours, two hours. And so the way around that is we pre-qualify people. And you, the hospital, have assessed, hey, Jackson, your Perdium pool for my ER consists of eight nurses.
00:27:49
Speaker
And there's a couple other suppliers in this market. Each of you have a handful of ER nurses that can work this space. When I have a per diem need, I'm going to put it out to all of you guys, but I've pre-qualified your people. I know that they've been orientated to my facility. They've been trained. They know how to work on my facility. They've had good references from my
00:28:09
Speaker
from my team captains on the floor. That's a fair process. To me, if I'm a staffing firm, I'll take that game anytime. You give me a chance to qualify my people, orient them to the unit, make sure they're ready to go, and then I'll run them as my pool, because I'll be putting work at other locations in this market. That per diem operation is a, you know, travel nurses got all the headlines, you know, you're gonna cope.
00:28:37
Speaker
But there was a lot going on in per diem. And importantly, some of the non-acute care operations, nursing homes, extended care facilities, rehab facilities, there's a lot of per diem work being done there because those facilities just had a hard time with turnover.
00:28:57
Speaker
So we as a staffing firm are in a position to help those people and we can embrace that and create an opportunity. Those places tend not to have the VMS systems because they do require kind of a cost to run. So there's certain scale to take the overhead of the VMS system. You have to have some scale. But the bigger chains, the bigger operators are doing that and trying to implement that. So to me, the VMS is
00:29:26
Speaker
critical role in gathering the data. And I go back to my, it's all about the data. It's all about understanding. So to interrupt for a second, ultimately, what you're saying is the real value of the VMS to the staffing agency, if you thought about it in this way, is the ability to have control over demand. I mean, to understand demand planning. I don't control it, but I do understand it now. I do have a way to see it. I understand its behavior. If I look back over time, I can see it over time.
00:29:56
Speaker
I can see my success or failure with it. And I know as a staffing firm where I come out in the supplier ranking that that client is doing. Every one of these meaningfully sized operator hospitals have supplier rankings. And I should know as a supplier where I stand and where I'm falling short.
00:30:20
Speaker
And you know what, that's as a competitor that hey, I, I just want, I just want a chance to compete. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, let's talk about the potential opportunities and risks for staffing agencies. So, so thinking about what you've said, when it comes to supply chains, it's all about demand planning.
00:30:40
Speaker
managing inventory, managing quality, managing cost. You need to have data. And if I hear you correctly, you've said staffing agencies, whether they like it or not, are going to be working with VMS software in a range of different settings. So with that in mind, what are the potential opportunities and risks for staffing agencies as employers
00:31:02
Speaker
not just in healthcare, but in a lot of other areas, start to adopt a supply chain approach to labor. How is that going to change how you compete as a staffing agency? Are employers going to start looking at different vendor selection criteria? Does the staffing agency need to develop different capabilities? Do the workflows change? Are we selling and marketing differently? You know, what happens as the supply chain approach is adopted? What does that do to staffing?
00:31:32
Speaker
No, two things. One, recognition of the sophistication of the supply chain model as a supplier to you, my client, I think goes a long way. So I'm no longer complaining about access to hiring managers. I expect access to hiring managers under controlled conditions. It's not like my hiring manager is
00:31:55
Speaker
giving me preferential orders, there's a good reason why you're picking my nurses if I'm submitting in a competitive way. It's because you think they're the best, simple as that. Because largely the price has been negotiated already. So I want to approach this issue of the VMS is a bad guy as an adult, essentially, and say, hey, you know what? I'm not going to complain about it because I understand the value of it.
00:32:21
Speaker
I think the second part of it is the, and this is where frankly, staffing firms need to look to firms like, you know, the big ATS providers to help us with the integrations. I think these integration opportunities in the VMS space are really important. So talk a little bit more about that. What are these, what does a good integration opportunity look like and how can that benefit both the staffing agency and the employer customer?
Integration of VMS and ATS Systems
00:32:50
Speaker
So it starts with requisition distribution. When the actual need comes out, and it doesn't have to come out in the same day, just when the need is identified in this process of, you know, I'll go back to manufacturing for a minute. In demand planning, we have a thing called the MRP, the manufacturing resource, material resource planning. And that would throw off a requisition to the warehouse and say, bring me these goods because I'm going to assemble these tomorrow. That MRP in a hospital system gets run off the bed system.
00:33:20
Speaker
and the census, and so that scheduling office knows there's a requirement there. It's either coming in as a long-term contract or potentially a per diem. I need visibility on that. As soon as the client knows they have a demand, that should be distributed to me as a supplier. I can do a better job. The more time I have, the more lead time. So requisitions, they have to be timely and complete. Give me enough information to actually do something with it.
00:33:47
Speaker
The second is I, as a supplier, need to be able to submit my talent. And depending on the requirement, some of that talent is essentially, if I submit, I know I'm going to get that fill, especially in per diem space. But I'm going to be able to submit people electronically. So I'm sitting at my ATS. I hang up the phone with
00:34:09
Speaker
with a nurse or an IT worker or any kind of worker. And I know they've got the availability, they've got the skills to match. I want to submit them. And I hit that button. I don't want to have to create a submittal form. I want to shoot to that MSP. If I got the rec from the MSP, I'm going to push my submittal into the MSP automatically. And the client then sees it pop up on their side in the best VMS systems. And they're able to then either schedule an interview or schedule a start.
00:34:39
Speaker
And that communication comes back to me as a staffing firm. I'm able to then communicate with my worker. And as we know, Chris, you and I have talked before about these roles, these mobile technologies that we're putting in the hands of our workers. They're gonna get that on their phone and say, hey, Tim, you're starting Saturday at ABC at 9 a.m.
00:35:06
Speaker
get ready to, you know, notice on Wednesday, it's on my phone and I can acknowledge it. And whoa, all of that process paperwork is good. You know, it's been shrunk into, you know, eventually digital transactions. So, so there's a possibility of streamlining a digital transaction that starts is a requisition in a VMS goes all the way through to the mobile talent platform and then goes back to the VMS and, and
00:35:35
Speaker
in
00:35:53
Speaker
But that is, I'll call it the holy grail of this process, is that we've got workers who have affiliated with staffing firms that they've built a trusted relationship with, they've shared information, they've been transparent about their expectations and requirements and skill levels, and that agency is doing their darnedest to put them to work in opportunities that they can be successful at.
Future of Staffing: Streamlined Processes
00:36:18
Speaker
It doesn't matter if you were doing, you're picking packages off a shelf,
00:36:24
Speaker
applying leads to someone's chest and gonna do an EKG. So I want my worker to be successful. As a staffing firm, there's nothing better.
00:36:33
Speaker
than for me to be able to come back and know that my workers felt good about their work. So in an ideal world, the staffing agency has a great relationship with their talent, but then they are using the demand planning and the VMS with their employers to create a sticky relationship with them as well. And that piece you called out, that mobile platform, so that completes the picture, if you would.
00:36:56
Speaker
to me. And then of course time gets processed through these things in terms of how I'm reporting my time.
00:37:04
Speaker
my pay gets distributed that way, I can see all my benefits, my client, all that three-way match of being able to match the timesheet to the invoice. These problems go away, the complexity shrinks, and there's always gonna be exceptions, but the number of exceptions shrink so that I've got a faster, more efficient process. So to me, that's the future of our business. And again, it turns on some of these discussions we're just having now are gonna work great
00:37:34
Speaker
a number of different types of roles. And I think they're gonna work for higher end roles over time. It's just a matter of how the technology evolves. Got it, got it.
00:37:45
Speaker
But if I hear you correctly, you're saying VMSs are here to stay. They don't have to be your enemy. They can work for the staffing agency as well as for the employer if they are done right. Demand planning and being able to proactively plan in advance for the needs of your customers.
00:38:05
Speaker
is a critical part of how a staffing agency would compete going forward being able to have that that that that supply chain discussion with with their customers a way of demonstrating strategic differentiation from competitors those are all things that i think i've heard you say um and that make a great deal of of sense to me and then what i also heard you say is
00:38:27
Speaker
Ideally, from a software and technology standpoint, we should be looking for ways for a VMS and ATS to be able to talk seamlessly and to pass through all the way to the mobile talent experience and back. Bingo. Yeah. So that makes perfect sense. And I know we could keep talking for a lot longer. Is there anything else you want to say to our audience, Tim, before we close out?
Talent Pool Management for Staffing Agencies
00:38:57
Speaker
First of all, again, thank you, Chris. I think the big themes that I'm hearing in our market now are the idea of really understanding the talent that we've touched as a staffing firm better, and frankly, not letting some of that talent
00:39:16
Speaker
kind of evaporate into our database where we never look at it again. The idea that we as talent brokers, I think, is just very attractive in terms of how we talk about our business. And the more we embrace that, the more we understand the opportunity there to be a talent broker
00:39:37
Speaker
If there's a high stake role and I'm hiring for the director of marketing, for example, of some kind of service firm, well, you know, I got to get that right. So it's going to, it's going to be different, but the fundamentals are the same. I've got to have a pipeline of people that I can't just start from scratch. I need to know that market. I need to know that niche. So my little, my little old little firm now is Elevation Talent Group, little, it's just a startup.
00:40:04
Speaker
So we focus on marketing and HR. And so we've got these pools of people that we've been working with in those niches that we're developing work opportunities for. And that's how our business is going to grow. Yeah. So presumably, and this is one of my favorite sayings is if you want to sell to employers, market to talent. I think that that really makes a great deal of sense that ultimately the agency with the best pool of people will always win.
00:40:34
Speaker
you know, if they are ready to go when your customers need it. I think you're right. So Tim, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights around labor supply chains and healthcare staffing, as well as, you know,
00:40:48
Speaker
the staffing industry overall. And I have to say, I really enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to having you back for future episodes, if you're willing. And I want to thank our audience. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe to the Aviante Digital Edge. If you'd like to learn more about Aviante software platforms, please check out our website at aviante.com. And until next time, this is Chris Ryan. Thank you for joining us on the Aviante Digital Edge.