Solution Developer Helps Customers Minimize Recruitment Costs with Web-Based Model
Partner: expressHR
Partner Web Site: www.expresshr.com
Partner Size: 45 employees
Country or Region: United Kingdom Industry: Professional services
Company: Carillion
Web Site:www.carillionplc.com





Partner Profile
Feltham, England–based expressHR is a leading provider of recruitment vendor management technology for permanent, temporary, and contract labor.


Software and Services
n  Microsoft® Server Product Portfolio
  −   Windows Server® 2003
  −   Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005
n  Software-plus-Services















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"Software-plus-services also makes it possible for companies to streamline their accounting practices - some of our customers have used our solutions to reduce invoicing costs by up to 75 percent."
Nick Ray, Chief Executive Officer, expressHR

Large recruiters and enterprise corporations use hosted recruiting solutions from expressHR to streamline their operations. The software-plus-services model helps expressHR deploy solutions in half the time of on-site systems, and customers enjoy predictable costs while avoiding staffing and security concerns. What’s more, expressHR can constantly improve the functionality of its Web-based solutions while saving customers the inconvenience of performing upgrades.


Business Needs
United Kingdom–based expressHR was founded in 2001 to provide staffing solutions for enterprise organizations, particularly those that need to manage significant numbers of temporary or contract workers. “Recruiting and managing labor forces involves a tremendous amount of work, from posting job vacancies to handling time sheets and billing,” says Nick Ray, Chief Executive Officer for expressHR. “We wanted to automate our processes and make it easier to eliminate duplication of effort.”

The company’s target market includes recruitment companies and those in industries such as construction, hospitality, warehousing, and IT outsourcing. “Access to information and systems can be a real issue for organizations with large temporary labor forces,” says Paul Raine, Operations Director for expressHR. “We wanted to help prospective customers overcome that barrier and provide the ability for all appropriate parties—from human-resources staff members to the temporary workers themselves—to access and track the information that they need.”
At its inception in 2001, expressHR chose to develop its solutions on Microsoft® technologies, and it became a Microsoft Certified Partner in 2005. “We were able to build enterprise-class software in a cost-effective manner because of our use of Microsoft technologies,” says Ray. “Additionally, we took advantage of the training materials and advanced online help that are provided by the Microsoft Partner Program.”

Leaders at expressHR determined that the best way to provide companies with the recruitment management tools that they needed was to use a software-plus-services model, which means that expressHR hosts the solution and that customers pay based on their transaction throughput. “Using a hosted, Web-based approach made sense because it helped us overcome the issues that traditional, on-site systems face,” explains Ray. “Software-plus-services also makes it possible for companies to streamline their accounting practices—some of our customers have used our solutions to reduce invoicing costs by up to 75 percent.”

Because it hosts its solutions, expressHR can update and improve solutions on an ongoing basis, without having to rely on a customer’s IT department for help or interfering with end-user productivity during upgrades. Customers reap multiple benefits from the constantly evolving solutions. For instance, Carillion—one of the leading support services and construction companies in the United Kingdom—relies on expressHR for its start-up managed services arm, which is responsible for the recruitment of all non-permanent workers across Carillion. “Carillion used to handle 		recruitment at a local level with manual processes,” says sPaul Preston, Business Systems Manager for Carillion. “That resulted in a huge supply chain, an inability to optimize our spending, and a lack of coordination. We wanted to overcome those obstacles, and expressHR was the logical vendor to help.”

Within three years, Carillion anticipates that it will process at least £60 million (U.S.$122.5 million) through its express HR solution annually, and the company can continue to use the solution as its needs increase. “We’re not only avoiding the hidden, unknown costs that materialize with an on-site system, but we’re also in control of our costs because we pay only for what we use,” says Preston. “Plus, the hosted model relieves us from the traditional security and privacy issues that we’d need to manage if we were the ones dealing with employees’ information.”

Benefits
For expressHR, hosting its solutions helps the company offer flexible, convenient, cost-effective service to customers and, therefore, expand its revenue base. “The software as a service model promotes a strong recurring revenue stream,” says Ray. “We expect to continue our trend of 35 percent annual revenue growth.”

Faster deployment. The company can deploy its solutions to customers more quickly with the software-plus-services model than with a traditional system, as was the case with Carillion. “We were able to have the expressHR recruitment solution up and running 50 percent faster than it would have taken with a client/server-based system,” says Preston.“As a start-up operation, it was critical for us to have our solution in place because, without it, 		we would have either fallen back on manual processes or delayed our ability to get people into their jobs.”

Flexibility for software changes. The software-plus-services model also makes it possible for expressHR to change its solutions as necessary, which means that its customers always have up-to-date, optimally functioning tools at their disposal. “We upgrade our solutions to improve functionality for customers an average of twice each week,” says Raine. “That kind of flexibility is something that we just wouldn’t have with a traditional client/server scenario.”

Greater customer acceptance and value. The hosted business model is more approachable for customers because it makes the solution a revenue-based purchase, rather than a capital expense. The expressHR solutions provide customers with predictable costs and a consistent recruitment process. “We use the solution to optimize our non-permanent worker spending through a coordinated approach across Carillion,” explains Preston. “We estimate that we will save several hundred thousand pounds per year through our use of the expressHR solution.”

Partnership support and credibility. Membership in the Microsoft Partner Program helps expressHR provide employee training, resolve issues, and enter customer environments more easily. “Our partnership status with Microsoft increases credibility when customer IT departments are evaluating our solutions,” says Ray. “After customers hear that we’ve built our solutions on Microsoft technologies, we don’t get any more questions because we have built-in legitimacy.”