Simplifying Barrett’s HR Processes Using Solutions Built on AWS

Founded in 1941, Barrett provides warehousing, transportation, and fulfillment for clients in many industries. It manages more than seven million square feet in logistics centers across the United States. Different seasons drive large fluctuations in Barrett’s staffing needs. Additionally, its rapid growth presents a need to add workers for new facilities quickly.

Barrett had been handling its HR processes manually, using spreadsheets to share data among hiring agencies, internal HR, payroll, and other departments. Manual data entry was prone to mistakes that resulted in costly errors, and it couldn’t scale to accommodate seasonal needs. “We hit our breaking point on the paper-based method, and we couldn’t keep hiring more administrative staff,” says David Lynch, Barrett’s Director of IT Solutions and Security. “Plus, paperwork is not the best use of time for our HR group.”

In October 2021, the HR department purchased an applicant tracking system, software that follows candidates throughout the recruiting and hiring process. However, the software did not connect with the solution Barrett used to manage employee time and attendance. “Our in-house tools were very code heavy,” says Mike Shook, Administrator of Supporting Systems and Architecture at Barrett. “We wanted something that was more understandable by our users.”

While it was looking for a new solution, Barrett also made a strategic decision to hire fewer new temporary workers. Instead, it aimed to transition current temporary workers—whom the company calls Future Barrett Associates (FBAs)—to full time. Rather than hire developers to create HR software to support the FBA initiative, Barrett turned to the SnapLogic IIP. “That type of initiative wasn’t even a thought before,” says Lynch. “We wouldn’t have been able to accomplish that without the SnapLogic solution.”

Built on AWS, the SnapLogic IIP uses a design pallet and simple-to-use interface so that nondevelopers can visualize the workflows. It built its compute infrastructure on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Each SnapLogic customer runs its processing in a single-tenant architecture hosted on AWS. Barrett runs its solutions using Groundplex, a SnapLogic compute instance that is automatically deployed inside Barrett’s Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which defines and launches AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network.

The IIP connects data among third-party software and the other AWS services that Barrett uses. Barrett stores HR data in a data lake built using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. The company runs analytics on top of the data to produce summaries and reports using Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes.

Recognizing the value of an HR solution that connects disparate systems, AWS added the SnapLogic IIP to the AWS Solutions Library in 2022. The AWS Solutions Library is a portfolio of software solutions that AWS curates after extensive vetting and testing. Like the IIP, solutions in the AWS Solutions Library are automated and ready to deploy to meet an organization’s needs.

Using the IIP solution, Barrett cut the time to process a new hire from hours to 5–10 minutes. “It removed a lot of human errors,” says Kaitlyn DaSilva, Barrett’s Human Resources Information Systems Manager. “We gained more visibility and data integrity and freed our humans to do tasks other than data entry.” Barrett’s IT department worked alongside the SnapLogic team to build custom integrations, such as customized error messaging. “We reduced problem-solving time to absolute minimum effort using SnapLogic’s solution,” says Shook.

In March 2023, Barrett implemented the solution that it built using SnapLogic to automate the mass creation of profiles for its FBA hires, which reach 100 people a month. Using the custom SQL procedure code it developed, Barrett has automated many previously manual tasks. These tasks include the creation of employee identification numbers for a new employee’s profile.

“Something that sounds relatively straightforward is amazingly complex when you have to think about all the underlying bits and pieces that go into doing it manually,” says Shook. “The only reason we can do it is because we had the opportunity when we migrated to SnapLogic. Before, there wouldn’t have been any way to handle it.”