Goodwill Houston Creates $2.3M In New Revenue, Bolsters Productivity by 14% With On-Demand Labor

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“Veryable has been an incredible partner for flexible labor to help make sure our locations consistently have the manpower they need to help drive our revenue”

-Jim F. (VP Retail)

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Background

Goodwill Industries of Houston was established in 1945, and, today, has over 100 locations that receive and sell donated clothing, accessories, home furnishing and more. In fact, Goodwill's retail operations is the economic engine that funds their workforce mission and programs.

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Challenges

Goodwill Houston was experiencing higher than normal - and more unpredictable than ever - donation volume. This, combined with an already volatile labor market and growing pandemic, created critical operational bottlenecks and debilitating labor shortages.

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Bottlenecks led to piles of donated goods not ready for processing, which meant missed revenue opportunity. Labor shortages led to overtime and turnover of an exhausted, frustrated workforce. This quickly become a crisis situation, resulting in decreased revenue, dipping productivity levels and excess spending on recruiting and hiring.

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For Goodwill to increase capacity, speed up donation processing and clear out its various operational bottlenecks, they needed a tool that would deliver instant access to flexible, "on-demand" labor.

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The Veryable Solution

Veryable’s digital marketplace for on-demand labor provides Goodwill with greater access, speed, and selectivity. The marketplace delivers a flexible labor solution that instantly connects Goodwill with thousands of locally pooled, “on-demand” workers to flex up and down at zero cost to scale.

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Goodwill’s “on-demand” labor is designed to be short cycle (daily or weekly increments) and plugged in and out of operations the moment donation demand shifts, enabling a real-time approach to output. As soon as Goodwill posts the work, it is pushed out to the broader marketplace for Operators (47k in Houston) to see on their app and then bid on the work.

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Application

Goodwill realized that their retail operations will always have fluctuating donation demand, oftentimes unpredictable, so deploying only a fixed workforce to respond to their variable needs no longer made sense... ...nor did more OT or over staffing. Instead, they used Veryable to flex labor capacity up and down at a moments’ notice and zero cost to scale; meaning, Goodwill only pays for the labor they use. This also meant Goodwill would never be capacity constrained again!

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Goodwill blended Veryable’s on-demand concept into their existing labor model as a complementary, flexible extension designed to peacefully co-exist with their full-time workforce. In order to assist in the pandemic-driven donations volatility and labor unpredictability, Veryable represented over 50% of Goodwill’s distribution center workforce. Today, Veryable represents about 10% of that same workforce.

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The main work areas and type of work include:

• Retail: backroom associates, material handling, loading/unloading
• Outlets: material handling, bailing, loading/unloading
• Project Based: after hours work (ex. trailer unload, clear out backroom)
• Transportation: "driver helpers", loading/unloading
• Production: hanging clothes, tagging retail items, pricing merchandise

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Results