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MSB International
Overview
MSB International PLC is Europe’s premier supplier of human resources and integrated recruitment services. Founded in 1984 as a specialist IT contract recruitment company and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 the company has since diversified into new markets.
MSB now delivers skilled contract and permanent professionals in the areas of engineering, finance, human resources, sales and marketing, secretarial, supply chain and technology. MSB is recognized as a leading recruitment provider to an extensive client base, including 100 of the FTSE 250 companies and smaller to medium business enterprises, across a broad range of industry sectors.
Challenge
UK-based MSB International knew the script because it has happened to countless companies before: the bigger they got, the less efficient they became because the corporate infrastructure, employee knowledge base and customers are so dispersed. With more than 218,258 contractors in its database and close to 54,994 European client contacts, MSB was determined to avoid a downgrade in customer service, the raison d’etre of its service-based employee recruitment business.
The company has maintained its position as a leading provider of global human capital management solutions. However, the organization also made a specific effort to focus on the development of client relationships and the provision of broader based, higher value services. It knew it could not provide the external delivery of this broader portfolio of services without internal and technological support throughout the organization.
Following a competitive review, MSB turned to Metastorm to automate its internal processes in support of its re-focus on customer service. Among the selection criteria was a need for a fast and cost-effective approach, the ability to track and record progress, and a mindset in which technology should adapt to the business instead of the other way around.
Solution
Metastorm laid out what it saw as the top goals for MSB’s Business Process Management (BPM) effort:
- Simplify administration
- Reduce the cost of processing and managing candidates, and
- Use MSB’s existing IT infrastructure
The first step to meeting these goals was freeing staff in MSB’s six locations from their paper-based tasks so they could spend more time with customers and perform other higher value functions that were necessary for a customer-centric company. While data still needed to be captured from multiple departments on customers and their requirements, contractors and the pay rates, and other related information, it is now done electronically. And it is accessible and traceable by multiple users.
Accomplishing this required a series of applications developed with Metastorm’s BPM software. The applications were developed in conjunction with the end users, who mapped out their ideal process, and the IT staff, who did the heavy lifting – the coding and testing of the application and its integration with databases.
The first and most critical process the company automated in Metastorm BPM is its ‘Contractors Out Form’ known within the company as COF. This process is basically a sales agreement for all of its divisions that allows any MSB associate to complete the form directly from their Intranet portal. Using Metastorm, the COF is automatically routed to appropriate individuals for scrutiny and authorization, but its capabilities go beyond mere routing. As an application it captures appropriate information from databases and includes the necessary form fields from the sales associate, thus enabling users to work within the application, not just move it along.
A core philosophy within MSB is that the IT systems support and flex around the business process, not the other way round. For instance, placements made under Managed or Preferred Status have different business rules applied to them and thus are required to involve another series of processes such as comparing the COF with the pricing in the database, and getting approval. If the contract has non-standard language, the application automatically sends the COF to the legal department for review, modification and approval. In other cases, the COF process requires updating the accounting department’s system with the pricing, tax and salary information. With the application, this not only eliminates the need for data re-entry, it automatically extracts the information necessary for generating invoices, thus creating a level of efficiency not previously achieved at MSB.
Metastorm BPM tracks the COF throughout its process and alerts users if a COF is in one place for more than one working day, which keeps it moving through the process. A record is made of each department’s throughput and is stored in the Metastorm BPM folder trail. This keeps track of who approved what and when.
Due to the success of its COF process automation, MSB has further leveraged Metastorm BPM across the company and to date has over 31 processes deployed including processes to perform credit checks on new clients, tracking permanent placement clients, client contract management, client survey response management, internal IT helpdesk management, and compliance with UK employment agency legislations as well as numerous Human Resources processes.
MSB’s Employment Agency Act (EAA) process was put into place to help the company comply with the UK Employment Agencies Act and regulations that were implemented April & July 2004 as an update of the 1973 regulations that were designed to protect work-seekers and employers using the services provided by an employment agency or employment business. MSB is required to gain permission from its contractors to document how they will be employed and whether or not they want to “opt-in or opt-out” of the legislation. Metastorm BPM is used to track and document all of this required information.
Results
To date, MSB is extremely pleased with Metastorm BPM and has endorsed it as a business-critical component and over the past five years, MSB reports it has processed 117,000 folders through Metastorm BPM. Moreover it has processed over 32,000 COF processes since deployment.
Because it was part of MSB’s IT infrastructure, the Metastorm BPM platform was able to quickly generate the necessary applications that eliminated time-consuming processes. It did not require a significant addition to the IT system, and there were tangible results due to the increased internal efficiency: £100,000 saved over a one-year period from the COF application alone. This was derived from 200 users saving up to 4,000 hours per year in process implementation time.
The platform approach of Metastorm BPM means MSB can continue to modify and develop new applications for other people-intensive processes. The company is realizing ongoing benefits with the most important one being the ability to manage its critical business processes across its 6 locations and among its 250 employees.
Overall, Metastorm BPM helps MSB eliminate extraneous processes to focus instead on its customer service mission. The implementation of the system actually led to MSB being a finalist in the Computing Awards for Excellence in 2005 for Most IT Enabled Small Business of the Year.
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