5 March 2024

How to Manage Light Industrial Temp Workers with a VMS

Wayne Burgess
Wayne Burgess

Hiring the right talent for your organization is the key to success, but what happens when those skills are getting scarcer every single day? Finding and retaining qualified, dedicated, and hardworking light industrial temporary workers and permanent hires can be quite a challenge for your business. In this article, we share the essential strategies needed to effectively attract and retain a temporary light industrial workforce for your business.

Many businesses who require light industrial skills are turning to the contingent workforce engaging temporary workers to fill their needs. The companies that are doing this effectively are reaping the rewards.  The industry's high turnover and no-show rates only add to the difficulty of keeping these valuable employees engaged throughout their assignments. 

Sourcing and keeping light industrial temps doesn’t come without its challenges. Sourcing, engaging and managing temporary workers is complex and comes with many pitfalls that you must overcome properly if you want to build a highly-effective non-employee workforce. 

In this article, we will look at:

  1. The growing skills gap and why temporary workers are a necessity for any business in the light industrial sector.
  2. Why you can’t rely on manual management processes when building your temporary workforce, and how new technology can revolutionize how you manage non-employee workers.

The light industrial skills shortage & why temp workers are necessary to fill the gap

The shortage in light industrial and skilled labor is an issue for almost every single industry in the world, and with turnover in the industry being incredibly high, this problem is even more challenging in the light industrial sector.

In fact, according to Korn Ferry’s Future of Work research, by 2030, the global talent shortage could reach 85.2 million people - costing companies trillions of dollars in lost economic opportunity.

Within many industries, there are more and more employees looking for remote and temporary work. But this is far from the truth for the light industrial skill category.  Skills in the light industrial sector are still difficult to find, depending on the industry and the skill type. In most cases, general labor in the light industrial sector is hard work, the hours can be horrible and the pay isn’t always great.

That’s where the creation of a non-employee workforce comes in

Hiring the right talent for your organization is the key to success, but what happens when those skills are getting scarcer every single day? What if you only need them for a day or just a shift? To beat the skills shortage, fill those staffing gaps, and access talented workers before your competitor, it’s likely that you have turned to staffing agencies and begun to build your own pool of non-employee temporary workers. 

When managed correctly, temporary workers can help your business access top talent and beat the skills gap, all while saving your organization money and improving your ability to adapt to changing marketing conditions. 

Despite these benefits, the management of a non-employee workforce is incredibly complex and it’s crucial that your business has access to a technology solution that ensures you have complete visibility into your temporary workforce and the vendors who provide them. 

Collaborating with staffing agencies in the light industrial sector is often viewed as a crucial step in overcoming the skills shortage dilemma. While it provides access to top talent, it can also lead to increased expenses and subpar hiring choices if not effectively managed. 

It's important to remember that is often due to poor vendor management processes and non-employee workforce management processes that lead to poor supplier performance, a lack of visibility into your workers and, ultimately, wasted money.

To learn how you can better manage your extended workforce, your organization first needs to learn the complex nature of contingent workforce management and why manual processes are far from effective. 

Managing a temporary workforce effectively requires more than manual processes alone.

The temporary workers you source, engage and manage, and the vendors you work with to hire them, create a huge amount of data that your company must properly manage if you are to have complete visibility and control over your non-employee workforce.

Without visibility into your temporary workers and without consolidating your vendors into one centralized location, your business will end up with inefficient processes, wasted time, overpaying vendors and poor hiring decisions that all impact your bottom line. 

That’s why manual processes simply aren’t enough to manage your non-employee workforce.

Despite this, most businesses are still using manual and time-consuming spreadsheets, in-house databases or SharePoint sites to manage their temporary workers and staffing agencies. This will leave your organization with no real way to manage its vendors, and your hiring decisions will be entirely based on opinion rather than fact.

Why your business needs a Vendor Management System to manage its temp employees

Instead, it’s crucial that your light industrial business turns to the automated technology solution of a Vendor Management System (VMS). This will give you complete visibility and control over your staffing vendors and temp workers.

A VMS is a cloud-based software platform that automates and consolidates the management of your entire non-employee workforce and staffing vendors in one centralized location. It allows you to automate the entire process, from engaging with a staffing vendor, measuring vendor performance, sourcing talent, paying temporary workers and much more. 

Light Industrial: The Benefits of a VMS 

By using a vendor management system to automate this process, your light industrial business will realize benefits such as: 

  • Increased attendance
  • Reduced turnover
  • Improved worker quality
  • Elimination of timekeeping and invoicing errors
  • Ability to schedule workers across multiple work shifts and locations
  • Improved workforce visibility
  • Providing workers with job simulations so they know exactly what their job will be
  • Saved money and better workforce hiring decisions
  • Complete workforce automation for improved efficiencies
  • Better supplier performance through the use of KPI’s
  • In-depth reporting and analytics on the performance of your entire non-employee workforce management program, allowing you to base future decisions on fact and not opinion.

Is it possible to find a VMS that works for your specific needs? 

Traditional VMS’ are unable to support the sourcing and management of light industrial workers. The prices can be ridiculously high and the functionalities were built for large commercial organizations, not mid-market companies. That has changed in recent years, with technology developers creating VMS solutions specifically for mid-market businesses.

Read more about VMS for Manufacturing and Light Industrial:

Conexis VMS: Build for the unique needs of Light Industrial Industry

Light Industrial workers make up over 60% of the Conexis worker population.  Conexis has developed VMS functionality specifically to support high volume worker environments such as digital site rosters and easy time clock integrations. With our unique functionality and specialized experience, Conexis customers report a significant reduction in turnover and an over 90% attendance rate.  Conexis VMS is the smart choice for organizations that leverage a light industrial temporary workforce.  Read more: Conexis VMS for Light Industrial 

Interested in learning more about Vendor Management Solutions?

Whether you are looking for a new VMS Solution, or just getting started, we are here to help.  See how easy Conexis is to use by taking a quick 2 minute Self-Guided Tour.  Contact Us for a Free No-Obligation Consultation to discuss your workforce challenges (and get immediate actionable insights) or Book a Personal Demo Today! 

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Wayne Burgess

Wayne Burgess

Wayne Burgess is the President of Conexis, a technology company focused on helping organizations get control of their Contingent workforce.

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