Most companies use a contingent workforce in order to increase flexibility and decrease costs. The use of a contingent workforce has grown greatly in the last fifteen years, to the point where 2% of the non-farm employment in the US is employed by temporary staffing firms, for a total spending of 64 billion dollars in 2004.

The irony is that the use of contingent workers has grown so fast and dramatically that many companies have not implemented reliable systems to track, measure, and report on this large expense item. In a recent survey of Fortune 500 firms, 21% could not estimate their annual spending on contract labor. In some industries, contract labor costs up to 10% of gross revenues, so this is a very large expense item—much too large to be so loosely controlled.

So why isn't staffing management a more prominent issue? One reason is that staffing costs are usually spread across individual departments, reducing the visibility they would have if aggregated. In addition, a company's "staffing process" is typically comprised of sub-processes that cross functional boundaries. An unsystematic approach makes it difficult to recognize the cumulative effect of inefficiencies and to engineer change. For these and other reasons, staffing often does not get the attention at the executive level that it warrants.

StaffingLogic is an autonomous, contingent workforce management division of The Judge Group, a thirty-seven year old, $140 million technical services firm headquartered in Philadelphia, PA. StaffingLogic provides systems, tools, and practices that enable organizations to achieve a level of staffing control, predictability, and performance that produces measurably better, faster, and less costly staffing services.

StaffingLogic VMS is a modular software application providing three main staffing services: requisitioning, time tracking, and invoicing. StaffingLogic VMS streamlines staffing-related processes by electronically automating the routine tasks and events associated with:

• Sourcing, hiring, and engaging workers
• Collecting and approving worker hours
• Invoicing and payment processing
• Analyzing staffing activity, spending and performance
• Allocating staffing-related costs
• Sharing data with enterprise business systems

StaffingLogic VMS can be acquired as a stand-alone, internally operated business tool, or as part of a professionally managed staffing program. It is offered by means of a secure, application service provider (ASP) model, so there is no software to install or maintain.