Pridestaff, based in Fresno, Calif., is a national staffing firm founded in 1978 with franchise offices in 40 different locations and a staff of 300. CIO Dan Donathan tells IncTechnology.com that moving from a client-server IT model to an on-demand software model helped lower the startup costs to franchisees and boost productivity by 25 percent.
Elizabeth Wasserman: How does Pridestaff operate?
Dan Donathan: PrideStaff is a franchise staffing organization. We currently have 37 offices throughout the United States. At PrideStaff, our goal is to enable the success of our franchisees. Our offices partner with clients to provide them with the flexibility and expert advice they need when it comes to decisions about how to best staff their organization. So, for example, we may take on all of the expenses typically associated with hiring for our clients – including worker’s comp, payroll taxes, paying the employee, and taking on the liability of hiring that employee. This enables companies to insulate themselves from those peak periods when they need to add someone without having to worry about laying someone off later or paying unemployment. Depending on their client’s needs we can also provide temporary to hire and direct hire services.
Wasserman: Why did you change the company’s IT model?
Donathan: We used to operate under the client-server model. That meant we had servers specific to our staffing software that we had to maintain and software that we had to manage licenses for. We decided about three to four years ago that we needed to leverage technology to gain a competitive advantage. We decided to partner with Bullhorn, the only 100 percent on-demand — or software-as-a-service (SaaS) – staffing solution. That has given us flexibility in terms of costs as well as a superior platform on which to do business. As a franchise company, one of our biggest concerns is for our franchisees and the costs necessary to start and grow their business.
With traditional shrink-wrapped software, upfront costs are much higher. With on-demand, we pay per user per month, so our costs are directly in line with the number of users we have. With shrink-wrapped software, licenses have to be purchased ahead of time and if you reduce staff, that’s a sunk cost. This model reduces the costs to our franchisees, and new franchisees have cut their upfront software expense by $6,000, which means a lot to someone in startup mode.
We’ve also found that with the on-demand model the software is able to evolve at a much greater pace than shrink-wrapped software can. We’ve been through multiple major upgrades that have introduced a lot of great enhancements. And since the infrastructure is maintained by our vendor, those upgrades didn’t cost us any overtime or downtime, they were seamless and required very little from our team other than learning the new features.
Wasserman: What types of applications do you have that are SaaS?
Donathan: Every function we do in the offices is SaaS — e-mail, calendar, customer relationship management for our sales people and all of our staffing functions as well. This package brings them all under one roof. We’re able to track relationships with our clients and employees from initial contact all the way through to receiving an order, filling the order and placing the right employees with a client. One of the reasons we chose this vendor was because of a tight integration with e-mail. Most staffing software packages have a rough integration with e-mail. But this system has the ability to recognize the source of an e-mail and connect it to that client or candidate. And we can look at every e-mail sent to a candidate or client. That along with the integrated CRM helps our users get a 360-degree picture of interaction with any client or employee.
Wasserman: What have the results been?
Donathan: It certainly has increased efficiency. Our own franchisees have given estimates of up to a 25 percent increase in productivity in their offices. It’s also saved our new franchisees money and it allows us to bring on new franchisees much more quickly than in the past. We used to have to purchase the software, wait for the licenses, but now there’s almost no interaction with our vendor required to bring a new location online. I can’t say that the initial move to SaaS has saved money, there is a significant investment involved in moving your line of business application. But it has a huge benefit to our franchisees and has allowed us to reduce the IT infrastructure required at our corporate office. Outsourcing that technology has allowed us to save on servers, bandwidth and time spent keeping that infrastructure going and it continues to pay dividends.
