High season and an increase in orders present most logistics companies with a problem: how to secure an increased number of personnel to successfully achieve their goals? A new solution has appeared on the Polish market – the Master Vendor concept, which, according to its creators, is intended to revolutionize existing methods of cooperation with temporary employment agencies.
The economic upturn in sectors such as industry, construction, and FMCG is clearly translating into improved sentiment in logistics as well. In May of last year, the CSO economic climate indicator rose by another point. A higher number of orders means that companies in the industry are increasingly in urgent need of extra hands to work.
Temporary work and large recruitment projects
So far, the most effective solution has proven to be cooperation with a temporary employment agency, as this form of employment guarantees high flexibility and allows for freely adjusting the number of personnel to real needs. Thus, it eliminates both the risk of a lack of employees and the problem of maintaining unnecessary positions.
However, as the number of temporary personnel grows, problems usually arise that particularly affect large logistics companies employing even several hundred temporary workers and possessing an extensive network of facilities. Typically, employment agencies are not able to independently provide, for example, 500 employees every month. By necessity, companies must rely on cooperation with even several agencies and divide orders to guarantee a constant influx of labor. However, different agencies use different cooperation models, which obviously leads to significant complications. These appear most often at the communication level, as the company must constantly control and coordinate the work of many suppliers, dividing the pool of orders. Diverse work standards and personnel management methods used by individual suppliers also become problematic. Inconsistencies often appear at the level of employee onboarding, differences during training and tests, which in effect reflects on the quality of the work itself. It happens that companies complain about the “dilution of responsibility” of agencies for the execution of tasks. Paradoxically, therefore, the solution that was supposed to streamline the company’s work leads to chaos and becomes a problem itself.
Master Vendor, or organizing the chaos
The answer to these problems may be the Master Vendor service – an innovative concept of cooperation between a company and agencies, created with complex recruitment projects in mind. This latest human resources tool is almost unknown in Poland.
The most important and at the same time most innovative assumption of the Master Vendor model is selecting a main supplier who will coordinate the work of other agencies on behalf of the client and oversee the successful execution of HR tasks.
This concept primarily simplifies the company’s communication with sub-suppliers, as it enables contact only with the main supplier. Cooperation with other agencies is completely taken over by the Master Vendor – it sets goals for individual suppliers and monitors their implementation on an ongoing basis. Importantly, the communication model itself is unified and fully optimized, which increases its efficiency. As a result, the client still has many sub-suppliers but no longer has to waste time contacting each of them. The main supplier becomes a single point of contact for both parties. The second aspect of Master Vendor is the standardization of the operating methods of individual agencies. The main supplier introduces unified methods of recruitment, training, and testing, which ensures the delivery of high-quality personnel by each of the partners. Further standardization applies to the methods of managing temporary employees. All agencies therefore use the same patterns for onboarding, time tracking, or controlling and motivating employees. Thanks to this, even with a very extensive structure of facilities, the company maintains a uniform operating model throughout the country.
Alongside the optimization of communication methods and standards, the Master Vendor concept also brings unification at the level of efficiency control. The main supplier introduces uniform indicators of work performance and quality. Thus, the client obtains objective and transparent data on the results of operations.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 5/2010.