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One Thursday this summer, an Olsten Staffing Services office in Grand Haven, Mich., got a call from a large customer that needed 28 workers on the job beginning that Sunday night, the Fourth of July. Oh, and it needed them for the graveyard shift.
Enlisting that many people to start working late at night at the tail end of a long holiday weekend is a tall order even for Olsten, which is in the business of finding temporary help. But the Grand Haven office got a little help of its own, says Barbara Dillon, vice president for Olsten Staffing's Central division.
 Using a new order distribution application, the folks in the Grand Haven office zapped the request to peers in nearby Grand Rapids and Holland. With the application, each office could check its database of available assignment employees with the click of a button, Dillon says.
Net result: The customer, an office furniture manufacturer, had the 28 workers (plus some) it needed on Sunday night.
The system was three years in the making, the result of an overhaul of the company's campus and wide-area networks as well as the applications they support. Gone is a hodgepodge of multidrop and dial-up lines, replaced by a frame relay WAN feeding ATM DS-3 access links. Gone, too, are a slew of AS/400s, replaced largely by Unix servers in a central data center running Oracle and PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications.
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1999 User Excellence
Award Winner
OLSTEN STAFFING SERVICES
Primary business: Placement of temporary employees
Project name: Project Reach
Business case: Provide better customer service and support, as well as support continued company growth.
Cost: Not saying, for competitive reasons, but 3Com infra-structure alone cost at least $3.5 million and Sun servers cost upwards of $4 million.
Benefits: Improved collaboration among field offices in fulfilling customer orders; improved reporting and billing; shortened lag time between employee payments and customer invoicing.
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| The new, centralized database and accompanying applications give Olsten branches the ability to share data like never before, creating opportunities for them to help one another quickly find the best-qualified temporary employees. Billing and reporting systems have likewise been streamlined, allowing Olsten to meet the demand for custom invoices and reports. And this is all riding on a network infrastructure that puts a premium on redundancy.
What really earned Olsten the 1999 Network World User Excellence Award, however, was its unwavering dedication to meeting business objectives. The project involves plenty of leading-edge technology, but none of it is mere technology for technology's sake. James Harding, Olsten Corp.'s chief information officer, says of the project: "It was a business imperative if we were to continue to operate and grow substantially."
In the beginning
To fully appreciate the scope of the project, known as Project Reach, you have to go back to 1996 and understand the dilemma Olsten faced. At that time, Olsten Staffing was a $2 billion company, having grown dramatically from revenue of less than $100 million in 1980. It was clearly outgrowing its IS infrastructure, some of which Harding says dated to 1969.
Olsten Staffing in 1996 was largely a paper-driven company, says Linda Guillerault, an assistant vice president who was one of six field personnel chosen to co-lead a Project Reach technical team that would help ensure that the project met business requirements. Job applicants filled out paper applications, which were filed with additional documentation, such as test scores and interview notes detailing special skills. When a customer called looking to get a position filled, an Olsten staffer would pour through all the paper files looking for a good fit.
This paper-intensive, manual process made it difficult for one field office to help nearby branches fill positions. Olsten has some 625 field offices, many of which are located near each other, as in Michigan. But searching for candidates from another office meant phone calls, faxing back and forth, and culling through lots of paper files. Given all that, Dillon says it's unlikely that the furniture manufacturer would've been fully staffed on July 4 without the new order distribution system. The localization of client data made it especially difficult to service large corporate accounts properly. A big client, such as Chase Manhattan, would in effect have separate accounts with different field offices. Sending a single bill to such a client was therefore difficult, if not impossible, as was generating reports for customers detailing how many employees they used, for what positions and so forth. "Reporting was done area by area, region by region, in small Microsoft Access databases. It was difficult and time-consuming," Guillerault says.
Intracompany communication likewise left much to be desired. The main form of communication from headquarters to the field offices was a mail packet sent twice weekly. Now, it's e-mail and an intranet.
The fix
Olsten Staffing had two main goals for Project Reach: help deliver assignment employees and provide information to customers. The information includes performance data on how well positions are being filled, how much the customer is spending, and so on.
"Management of data was a major IT imperative," Harding says. "Unless we could centralize it, we couldn't manage it."
Centralizing the data, in turn, dictated a reliable, high-performance WAN as well as a high-speed headquarters net that could support a few key applications. It also meant ditching virtually every bit of infrastructure already in place. In short, it was the kind of project about which IS pros dream. "You get the opportunity maybe once in your career to start something like this and finish it," says Darin Prill, assistant vice president of technology for Olsten.
IS also had an ulterior motive.
"In the process, we got Y2K-compliant. There was no remediation. We just threw the old stuff out," Harding says.
Olsten early on decided what applications it needed to support, opting for Oracle Financials and a PeopleSoft payroll system. It also decided on continued use of Precise, a custom front-end system that facilitated data collection in field offices. But enhancements were needed so that Precise could feed data to the new back-end applications.
Next, Prill and his team met with 3Com and AT&T to map the network design. Olsten decided to go with 3Com for two reasons, one being that it had low-end 3Com gear installed in its field offices and wanted to stay with a single vendor, says John Loria, director of enterprise networking.
Similarly, Olsten already had a contract with AT&T and was able to renegotiate it to address the new requirements.
For the wide-area, Olsten opted for a frame relay network configured in a hub-and-spoke design, with 56K bit/sec ports and 32K bit/sec committed information rate (CIR) to most field offices. Now, nearly two years after it was installed, most of those connections are being upgraded to 256K bit/sec ports with 128K bit/sec CIR, a testament to the configuration flexibility inherent in frame relay, Loria says. A few larger facilities have multiple T-1 links back to the data center, which is located at the company's headquarters in Melville, N.Y.
Olsten uses AT&T's frame relay-to-ATM interworking service to merge all the frame relay traffic onto a single DS-3 ATM connection to the data center. The DS-3 connects to AT&T's Accu-Ring service, which uses self-healing fiber rings to provide a high level of redundancy in the local loop. A second DS-3, also from AT&T but delivered over a different physical path, serves as a backup, so there is no single point of failure into the AT&T network.
The ATM link terminates on a 3Com PathBuilder S-600 WAN Access Switch at headquarters. But the company had to jump through a bit of a configuration hoop to pull it off because the S-600 can't connect via ATM to the four 3Com CoreBuilder 7000 switches that form the backbone of the campus ATM LAN. Instead, the S-600 translates data back to frame relay format and connects each permanent virtual circuit to one of three 3Com NetBuilder II routers. The routers, in turn, convert the data back to ATM and ship it to the CoreBuilder 7000s.
"We started this when ATM wasn't mature enough to do what we needed. We had to cobble something together," Prill says.
Redundancy is key in the headquarters LAN. There is a backup NetBuilder II router outfitted with three configuration images, one for each of the primary routers. It can be brought online with the swap of a cable should any of the primaries fail.
The CoreBuilder 7000 switches connect to each other in a mesh configuration. Redundant 100M bit/sec connections link the 7000s to 11 3Com SuperStack II Switch 1000 switches, which connect to one of 65 SuperStack II Hub 40s via switched 10M bit/sec links, or to one of five Superstack II Hub 100s via switched 100M bit/sec connections. Users get 10/100 network cards.
This infrastructure supports 14 Sun Solaris servers, about 75 Windows NT servers and 550 end-user machines. The Sun servers and about half of the NT servers connect directly to the CoreBuilder 7000 switches at OC-3 speed. The remaining NT servers link to the 7000s via switched 10M or 100M bit/sec links.
The bulk of Olsten's Precise applications run on a single, 12-processor Sun Enterprise 6000 server, as do the Oracle Financials applications and the PeopleSoft payroll application. Each of these core applications also has an identically configured standby Sun machine in an active/ passive cluster. "We've got half-million dollar machines that are only there in case another half-million dollar machine goes down. This redundancy is necessary because of the mission criticality of the three applications," Prill says.
The remaining Sun servers support functions including Oracle databases, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView management system, the intranet, help desk, backup servers and application development. The NT servers support applications including Microsoft Exchange e-mail, a printing operation that handles 75,000 paychecks per week, Microsoft's Systems Management Server management application, file and print, and network authentication.
The Precise front-end used by field offices is key to keeping the amount of data flowing over wide-area links to a minimum, Prill says. Precise collects only the exact data each application needs, such as the bare minimum it takes to produce a paycheck. That data is then fed into the appropriate ERP system using APIs Olsten built.
The results
Olsten won't say how much it spent on the project, but if you look at a few of the costs, you'll get an idea. 3Com estimates Olsten paid $3.5 million for its equipment. Prill thinks that's low and notes that Olsten also pays 3Com $500,000 per year for support. The company also has at least eight Sun servers worth $500,000 each. Recurring frame relay charges to 625 branches? That adds up quickly. "The infrastructure cost was in the multimillion dollar range," Prill says.
Given that Olsten completed Project Reach in May for the U.S. and in September for Canada, the company hasn't yet gotten a handle on the exact cost savings and productivity gains. But as staffers in the Grand Haven office will attest, the project is most definitely paying dividends.
And the ability to help different offices fill positions is only the beginning. Another key capability that will come from the new centralized, consolidated data warehouse is enhanced billing.
Not so long ago, each office kept its own customer billing data. Then, several years ago, the company created the Partnership Database to hold data on larger clients. While that gave a national view of the largest clients and the ability to produce consolidated bills, it meant staffers had to enter data into their local database and the Partnership system. That's in the past, as the Precise system allows a national view of any account, with no duplication of data entry.
It's now far easier to deliver a consolidated, customized invoice to each customer, Guillerault says. Previously, a consolidated invoice meant manually pulling data from each local or regional office and assembling it into a single invoice.
An Oracle Financials application also makes invoices easy to customize. "We have a standard invoice format, but we can capture as many as six customer-defined fields," she adds.
A key benefit is that invoices go out much faster. Whereas the previous invoice process could take several weeks, the new one generally takes two days. On Tuesday, time sheets are collected from all 75,000 employees, via the network or through an interactive voice response system. Paychecks are produced on Wednesday and invoices go out to customers by the end of the week. That has cut by 10 to 15 days the lag time between when Olsten pays employees and when customers pay Olsten, Harding says.
Reporting capabilities have likewise taken a quantum leap forward with the addition of report-generation tools from Cognos. Each customer can dictate what metrics it wants to see and how the data should be arranged. It's also now easy to produce impromptu custom reports, Guillerault says.
The next step is implementation of reports that Olsten managers can use to learn about productivity and other operational metrics. At that point, Olsten will be able to better quantify the benefits of the Precise project. "We're still sorting through how to take full cost advantage of the systems we've implemented," Harding says.
There are hard cost savings, however, from things such as reducing fax costs by using e-mail instead, and from sending memos and training materials via the intranet instead of on paper. "Paper savings alone are in the half-million-dollar range per year," Prill says.
More to come
As Olsten tweaks business processes and reporting mechanisms to squeeze every bit of benefit out of Project Reach, it's also working on enhancements for customers.
While Project Reach allows for new levels of automation and communication for Olsten employees, and provides for better customer service, it still requires significant human intervention for order placement. Customers typically call a branch and explain what they need.
"A lot of our bigger customers want to place orders online, so we're investigating using extranet and Internet technologies to do that," Prill says. The same goes for reporting and checking on orders in progress, he notes. The goal is for customers to be able to do all that online, on their own, whenever they want.
At the same time, Olsten is exploring how to use XML-based transactions to present bills to customers and get payments back.
The application architecture to support each of these initiatives is already in place, and the company is now at work designing the supporting infrastructure.
Related links
Other 1999 winners:
Olsten's helpful hints
Olsten Staffing Services Web site
See last year's winners
Management software goes for the big picture
Enterprise users with more than one network management platform have never had a good way to tie them together - but that's beginning to change. Network World, 11/08/99
Managed WAN-a-phobia
Fear of giving up control haunts corporate networks. Network World, 10/25/99
3Com delivers on QoS promises
Network World, 06/07/99
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