Welcome to the ACT•1 Press Room
Purple Squirrel
December 2001
Purple Squirrel 100 Features:
ACT•1 Technical and Professional
Services
Ranking 70
Betting on Tech
by Andrea Snyder, Purple
Squirrel, Dec 2001
IT staffing and services company ACT•1 Technical and Professional Services, Inc., a part of ACT•1 Personnel Services, was ranked by Working Woman magazine as the "largest woman minority-owned employment agency in the United States." The Torrance, Calif.-based company says its biggest business differentiator is the Web-based system that helps staffing clients to more efficiently track hires and billing. ACT•1 placed 70th on the Purple Squirrel 100 list.
First implemented online in 1999, the Web-based system, which is constantly being upgraded by a team of in-house IT professionals, includes a requisitions piece, an automated records keeper, an office automation piece, and an online management reports application. About 20 clients, each of which accounts for more than $1 million of revenue annually, use parts of the Java-based system. Not one client that has begun using the system has stopped, ACT•1 reports.
"In order to continue to be competitive in this industry, where our major competitors are national and internationally sized companies, and we are relatively small in comparison to the Adeccos and the Manpowers and the Volts, we’ve had to rely very heavily on our technology," says ACT•1 executive vice president Carlton Bryant. "We have put a significant amount of money toward just making sure that our technology is equal to or better than what you see out there right now. We even have the ability in our system to use biometrics," identifying employees by irises or fingerprints, since mid-year.
ACT•1 says it spends 5 to 10 percent of its annual revenue on technology development and technology training. Since the end of 1999, it has spent as much as $3.5 million on technology, mainly to develop the Web-based staffing management system and its intranet, and $2 million on training.
"How we’ve grown our company is that we’ve reinvested almost totally into our company, so that we could make what has been a slow but passionate leap into a mainstream market," says ACT•1 founder and CEO Jan Bryant Howroyd. "With-out the ability to offer Web-based services and management tools that are superior in our industry, we believe that we still would be struggling up a ladder right now as the best little minority woman-owned business in the country."
Founded in 1978, ACT•1 first serviced media executives in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Howroyd "realized these companies were weary of flighty, star-struck applicants and she began to send talented, dependable people for interviews," the company says at its Web site. It later began providing IT contractors through ACT•1 Technical and Professional Services.
ACT•1, which provides contract, temp-to-hire, and permanent workers, says it employs about 55,000 contractors and 400 full-time staff through the 77 offices it operates around the country. In July 2001, the company was named Supplier of the Year by the Georgia Minority Supplier Development Council. Clients include Sempra Energy, the Ford Motor Company, Health Net, and The Gap.
Online Management System
Since 1999, contractors can record billable hours on ACT•1’s online system by clicking on an icon. Some clients, like Nestle, use swipe cards, which were implemented in the early 1990s before the system went online, though data from the swipe cards is now folded into the online database. Clients authorize hours with a digital signature.
The online system includes a primary database which houses all applicant information, such as resumes and tax forms, response time metrics, subvendor data, contractor rates, and other billing information. Clients can print out management reports detailing head counts, expenditures, and other information.
"You may have allocated or budgeted a certain amount to a project," says Bryant, who is also Jan Bryant Howroyd’s brother. "You may be half of the way through the project, yet you could be three-quarters of the way through the costs." Keeping abreast of that information, updated as quickly as clients sign off on timecards, "allows a manager to perform in a proactive manner rather than a reactive manner," he says. The system is tailored to meet each client’s needs.
Technology Training
ACT•1 says that about 85 percent of training revenue is invested in permanent employees who upgrade the company’s technology, and about 15 percent is distributed among contractors so they can keep skills up to date.
"In order for us to be on the cutting edge of technology, we have to make sure that we’re taking our existing human capital and reinvesting in them by allowing them to go and become certified in different areas, allowing them to attend seminars, et cetera, to make sure that they stay abreast of the latest technology and the best tools that are available for us so that we can remain the player that we want to be, which is the leader of the pack," says Bryant.
Some of the tools employed to maintain good relationships include asking clients to match scholarship donations and working with clients on community projects. In 2002, ACT•1 plans to begin providing IT staff to the aerospace and biomedical industries.
Press contact:
Chuck Pearson
ACT•1 Group
Director of Marketing
(310) 750-3400
cpearson@act-1.com