On-Demand Labor for Building Product Suppliers

When your orders come in for the next day and you see that it’s your pickiest customer with a bigger request than usual, you need a plan fast. And when your orders slim back down, you don’t want to pay people to stand around waiting for work.

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At Veryable, we help businesses solve this problem every day with our on-demand labor marketplace. We’ve seen hundreds of companies build flexible capacity and reach new levels of operational efficiency using our platform.

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In this article, you’ll learn how you can use on-demand labor to keep your labor costs aligned with your productivity goals, so you can hit your targets with less hassle.

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How on-demand labor helps building product suppliers complete more orders

On-demand labor enables you to flex your capacity daily. This means you can meet the demand from drive-through orders easily as you manage your regular daily volume. And when volume drops off, you can scale your workforce right back down to your baseline of FTEs.

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This flexibility means a few things for your business: you can meet daily demand variation, eliminate overtime, quit backfilling turnover, and build a labor pool of workers you trust.

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Your sales can grow and you can keep up

It’s common for a sales team to have a hot month and then the warehouse feels the burn as they fill all those new orders.With on-demand labor, you can avoid putting additional strain on your current workforce by bringing workers to address this spike in volume from the hot sales month. That means you can take more orders with confidence, knowing that as your sales team fuels growth, your warehouse can keep up.

You can quit backfilling turnover

With on-demand labor, you can quit backfilling attrition and meet your extra demand by using flexible labor capacity instead. That means bringing in extra workers only when you need them instead of hiring people you might not need every day and right-sizing your FTE workforce.  This creates the opportunity for your business to invest more in the FTEs and likely drive turnover down even further. This will reduce your FTE labor cost. Then when you meet additional demand with on-demand labor, you will be directly tying labor costs to the output you get on a daily basis.

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You can meet daily demand variation

There are likely times when you have less work to do, so instead of smoothing this out and delaying delivery to customers, or continuing at your regular pace and having people stand around, you could keep the minimum amount of FTEs and flex your capacity as needed to fill your orders every day.

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You can build a labor pool of workers you trust

As you meet changes in demand with on-demand labor, you can add workers you like to your labor pool, which is like a favorites list of workers who have performed well in your facility. This means you can have a trusted pool of workers to invite when you need extra hands. Avoiding breakages is important in the building supplies industry, so having quick access to these trusted workers who perform well in your environment will be a crucial factor in building flexible labor capacity.

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You can eliminate overtime

The flexible capacity of a labor pool eliminates the need for overtime. When you can invite on-demand workers instead of giving your current employees overtime, you create a win-win situation for you and your employees. They don’t have to work overtime, and you don’t have to pay overtime.

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Common tasks for on-demand labor in building product supplier environments

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Common tasks for on-demand workers in building product supplier facilities include:

• Unloading trucks
• Loading trucks
• Building pallets
• Picking orders
• Scanning inventory
• Driver Helper

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On-demand workers are able to support your facility by doing work that allows your FTEs to focus on what they’re best at. 

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Many on-demand workers have expanded their skill sets to include nearly everything that is done in a building product supplier environment. On the Veryable platform, it’s likely you will be able to find workers who can do whatever needs doing in your facility.

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We’ve heard from companies that their FTEs don’t mind working alongside Veryable Operators. In some cases, the fact that Operators keep the FTEs from having to work overtime improves the FTEs’ morale. If you’ve been in the industry long, you know that morale is a huge factor in retention, and is directly affected by the amount of overtime expected of employees. This is especially true when you have the bandwidth to invest in your FTEs further, but neglect to do so.

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How to get started with on-demand labor

Getting started with on-demand labor is easy. With Veryable, you only pay once the work you post is completed, and you can check out our on-demand labor platform for free today by creating your business profile.

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To learn more, check out our more recent article: How On-Demand Labor Helps Building Material Suppliers Tackle Spikes In Demand