Workforce enabled

By Dick Hughes  

NOVEMBER 29, 2010 2:29 p.m. (0)

When BMW needs workers to ramp up production, it turns to a Georgia company for contingent workers.  When it needs to slow down, it lets them go.

With production on the upswing so is hiring of these full-time contingent workers by BMW’s employment partner since 2006, MAU Workforce Solutions of Augusta.

By year’s end, more than 1,600 MAU workers will be on the job, about 23 percent of BMW’s workforce of 7,000 at the Greer plant.  The vast majority are material handlers, such as forklift operators, and other logistic production workers.

These temps are one piece of a complex workforce model increasingly popular with manufacturers for the flexibility to quickly and economically ratchet  employment in non core functions up or down with market demand and hold in place skilled, hard-to-replace workers.

Randy Hatcher, president of MAU, said companies are using temporary employees in part because “they need workers quickly coming out of the recessionary environment.  That’s one of the things we are seeing not just with BMW but with manufacturers nationwide.”

With a rocky recovery, he said, manufacturers “are uncertain how long this will last. So you need the people but you are not sure for how long.  The staffing industry is a good vehicle to help you meet the current needs.”

“BMW is thinking of building a better car. I think about how to find a better person, and that’s all I do,” said Hatcher, whose first book, “Birth of a New Workforce,” went on the market in mid November.

In Europe, he said, 50 percent of the industrial workforce typically is full-time employees and 50 percent is a smorgasbord of temps and contractors employed by different companies. “This will happen in North America.”

Hatcher’s premise is that companies need to partner with staffing companies like his for non-core work and not “think at all of what we do but trust that we are going to do it so they can keep their eye on the things that are important to them.”

In the real world at BMW, it means a MAU employee on a forklift moves parts from one place to another and a regular BMW technician calibrates the exhaust system on an X3.

While cyclical waves spur use up or down, manufacturers such as BMW see contingent, temporary, casual or contractual workers – they are identified by a variety of labels – as a part of their everyday workforce.

In April 2008, when BMW gave MAU a multi-year contract to provide full-time employees “to supplement BMW’s own workforce,” the automaker said it was “launching a new workforce concept.”

In October, when BMW announced that MAU would hire 600 workers to prepare for the launch of the X3, it reinforced its intent to “further develop a blended workforce strategy that continues to give BMW the resources and flexibility it needs for the long-term.”

Robert Hitt, public affairs manager for BMW at Greer, said the majority of the workers at the plant “are BMW employees, some are contingency staff as it relates to MAU and similar companies, others are contact staff in a variety areas.  They work for local companies and are assigned to BMW,”

It makes sense, he said, that core competence functions are handled by skilled full-time BMW employees, but functions outside the core such as IT, help desks, security, food, custodial, maintenance, loading and unloading are outsourced.

MAU, an acronym for Management, Analysis and Utilization Inc., is minority and family owned. Founded by Bill Hatcher in 1973 and now run by his son Randy, they are members of the Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama.

MAU has been active in the Upstate since 1980 when it started filling positions for BASF in Anderson.  Today it has 16 clients in the Upstate with a concentration in automotive, chemical and general textiles, according to John Davey, regional manager.

Davey said MAU has “right around 2,000“employees working in the Upstate at any given time.  BMW is the biggest client.  Milliken also is a longtime client.

Zachery Brewster, operations manager for MAU’s center on Pelham Road, said MAU interviews about 500 people a week.   They are a third through the 600 that BMW is adding after hiring 1,000 this summer and early fall.

“We’ve been bringing them on at about 65 people a week,” said Hitt. “That’s about as fast as we can bring them in, orient them and give them a three-week training process.”

The jobs pay between $11 and $15 an hour, competitive rates in the Upstate for the job classifications, and in the main are “long-term temporary.”    Unlike most staffing companies, Brewster said, MAU offers benefits, including a 401K program.   Applicants submit to drug testing and criminal-background checks.

“They work for us at MAU.  We manage their employment, payroll, any type of paper work that needs to be done, insurance, vacations, all of that,” Davey said.

At major clients like BMW, MAU has “management staff on site to manage the employment, anything from an HR standpoint that could come up with any of our associates on the site.”

BMW has created a path for temporary workers to become full-time regular BMW employees as a long-term strategy to take advantage of the “good environment for selecting full-time people” from the temp pool, said Hitt.

“It also creates a positive feedback for MAU.  It shows that there are opportunities at BMW,” Hitt said.

Davey and Brewster, both of whom  have been involved with MAU’s hiring for BMW since the beginning,  said while more technical knowledge is required these days, the most important qualities they look for  in applicants are stability in job history and a record of working as part of a team.

It’s not enough, Brewster said, for workers to think they will be alright if they just do their job.

“You have to work together to make the company better. We are looking for people who are career motivated. They don’t just want an 8 to 5 job but are looking to advance.”

With greater expectations for performance, MAU has added a corporate trainer and safety officer to its local staff and plans to provide forklift and safety training next year.

“I think the demands placed on a company like ours has caused us to be more sophisticated in how we screen for employees,” said Brewster.

“I don’t know that the job descriptions are vastly different than what they were five years ago, but the expectations for turnover and performance have gotten so high that it has caused us to make sure we are able to meet those measurable our clients desire.”