More personal attention for temporary workers (in part) thanks to RPA

Intensive supervision of each temporary worker and maximum personal attention, that is where Consolid makes the difference in the temporary employment industry. Since its establishment in 1990, Consolid has grown into the largest specialized temporary employment agency in transportation and security. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these sectors had a hard time, and the consequences did not go unnoticed. But the organization came through this period well and some parts of the company actually showed strong growth. A good example is home delivery services: a well-oiled planning team and a large pool of drivers ensured strong growth in the number of home deliveries on behalf of leading supermarket chains.

How do you ensure that in such a period of strong growth you are still able to give personal attention to every temporary worker? And at the same time keep the administrative processes in order and control the costs? This is where the use of a smart software robot comes in.

Administrative workload should not come at the expense of personal attention

In the past period, sometimes as many as 100 new drivers per week started in the home delivery services at Consolid. This increased the pressure on the organization considerably. Intermediaries had their hands full with the personal approach of candidates and onboarding of new drivers. The administrative workload also grew. Although the central ICT system AFAS provides a good basic administration, many manual actions are still required. Examples include checking candidate data for completeness or creating contracts with different travel costs for each candidate. Candidates must also often be logged into customers’ ICT systems.

All administration must be in perfect order to ensure correct payroll and billing every week. This is not an easy task. There is a risk that the administrative tasks come at the expense of personal attention. Or in other words, at the expense of case management, a principle that Consolid holds so dear. And that, of course, is what the organization desperately wanted to avoid.

Strong growth of home delivery provides opportunities for expanding RPA collaboration

In 2020, Consolid and Tacstone started an initial project to further automate business processes with UiPath’s RPA platform. As a result, many thousands of timesheets from temporary workers per week could now be automatically read into the time processing system. In addition, the software robot has since been “busy” weekly passing on all traffic fines to the appropriate drivers. The results of this project were positive and the cooperation with Tacstone was good. Therefore, Consolid decided to work with Tacstone to see where else in the organization there was a need for support from a tireless digital colleague.

RPA spreads like an oil slick across the organization

A Business Analyst and an RPA developer from Tacstone, together with the Consolid employees involved, analyzed the entire process from recruitment to hiring drivers for the home delivery market. All bottlenecks and possibilities for application of RPA were visualized. For each possible application, expected time savings, shorter lead time, error reduction and other possible benefits were considered. These benefits were always set against the expected costs of developing and maintaining the required robot script. In this way, a backlog of processes to be automated was created.

The result is now clearly visible: the new robot employee handles all kinds of ‘tedious’ tasks (almost) fully automatically on a daily basis, such as drawing up employment contracts, creating placements, updating files of temporary workers and calculating travel expenses. The main goal here is always to ‘free up’ Consolid employees in such a way that they can structurally give sufficient time and attention to both client and temporary worker.

The application of RPA is now spreading throughout Consolid’s organization like an oil slick. In Financial Administration, in the Central Back Office and in the Home Delivery department, the deployment of a new digital employee is now a reality. In some cases, processes are not only automated, but also rethought and immediately improved. And new processes are even created, such as automatic checking processes, which were not easily feasible in the old situation. For example, at the candidate level, the robot now first checks all hourly rates for deployment to customers for whom reversed billing or self-billing is applied. Any billing discrepancies are now immediately clear where they come from. And that saves a lot of tedious research.

The RPA project has now been underway for about a year. Much has been accomplished, but far from all opportunities for further automation have been exploited. The result so far? Across all processes, the deployment of RPA now saves about 150 working hours per month. Expensive hours of recruiters, planners and support staff. Hours that can now largely be spent on personal attention and case management. Every month.

More about Consolid

Bus drivers and transport companies, security guards and truck drivers: Consolid has been connecting professionals to clients in transport and safety since 1990. With 7,000 flex workers, they are now the largest specialized temporary employment and secondment agency in these sectors. Consolid matches companies with people who have been in the profession for years, or trains them so that they can start working immediately.