What's happening at JN Solutions?

The 2008/2009 Federal budget was released today. Plans have been outlined for the new employment services contract next year.

Changes focus on helping the most disadvantaged. As the majority of provider’s case-loads have trended towards these job seekers this will be good news for most providers.

For details follow the link below to a PDF of DEEWR’s planned changes.

The Future of Employment Services in Australia Summary

The Future of Employment Services in Australia Details

From: www.workplace.gov.au/ESReview

Need help with your 2009 Tender? Good news we just started up a new service over at www.tendersolutions.com.au.

Tender Solutions is focused solely on producing statistical data to help organisations in the 2009 employment services contract.

Tender Solutions combines a team that has over a decade of employment services experience backed by an incredible support team. Everyone has been through at least one tender and one of them has been through them all. The lead analyst at Tender Solutions has also recently been on a course specifically targeted at the 2009 employment services tenders.

The rest of this year just got a little less stressful for you.

Starcast has had a few handy features added, some compatibly issues resolved and has a new user admin system.

• Placement, Interims and Finals summary for the last 9 months displayed on the main page including breakdowns of jobseekers.
• Handy summary of scenarios displayed after selection.
• Full compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Firefox 2.
• An organisation’s security contact is now able to fully manage users accounts.
• Extensive frequently asked questions section added to the help system.

Starcast 2.2 went live today and now includes a management report that gives an overview of site and organisational performance.

This report is targeted at head offices for medium to large organisations, though all organisations will find it useful. It shows a short summary of every site and can be used as a tool to accurately monitor an organisation’s risk and performance on a weekly basis.

The report details current performance in terms of star rating, revenue and the site managers expectation for performance over the next three months.

Starcast 2.1 went live today including the much demanded scenario generator feature.

This new feature lets you create a performance scenario by specifying numbers of outcomes rather than selecting individual job seekers. This enables you to quickly create “what-if” scenarios.

Details: When you select the number of outcomes the system will create a scenario by choosing random job seekers that the site has placed in that time period. If you are forecasting your performance beyond a three month time frame the system will chose job seekers from your caseload that have the same characteristics as the site’s recent placements.

It’s two months after the end of the milestone and the first 2008 DEEWR star ratings are still not out.

I remember waiting for my star ratings to come out and thinking

“How are providers supposed to operate in this environment?”

By the time the ratings do come out the period in which to make placements for the next milestone is almost over.

If when the ratings do come out they are bad, it’s too late to implement a strategy for the next ratings (if the business is not closed before then anyway).

Not everyone is suffering; JN Solutions customers using Starcast got their star ratings the first day they were back at the office after the New Year. In fact they got their star ratings the next week as well, and every week after that.

Not only that that, every Monday when they log in to our site they see the placements that were made last week and after updating one of their ‘scenarios` they can see what effect that will have on their ratings in three months time.

Job Network does not have to be a risky business. Our team has just spent nine months of intense work making sure that it is not.

We have just launched a competition for a new logo.

If you wish to enter please go to http://99designs.com/contests/5593

The competition will be open for 10 days.

Good luck to everyone who enters.

Starcaster 2.0 about to go into testing, we just have a few tweaks to do on the user interface.

Version 2.0 of Starcaster will have the ability to look at the placements you have made recently and gives you the ability to create scenarios with different outcomes. This will then be graphed as a performance line and help you to secure the star rating you want up to 3 months ahead.

Looking ahead version 2.1 will enable you to put more speculative numbers in for more long term forecasting.

The first version of Starcaster, our flagship product, has been finished. We were hoping to be a little further down the development path at this stage but the project has required a lot more work than estimated.

This version graphs the history of a site in terms of star rating and is updated weekly – Creating this was the tricky bit so the forecasting and revenue sections should follow quickly.

We do not see version one as a complete solution so until further notice our rates will be substantially discounted.

Please give us a call on 02 9029 7080 if you would like to discuss in more detail our plans for the next release.

We have had an extremely positive response to our call for help with getting data from organisations.

We have just had our 20th organisation give us access to their performance data. All the organisations that have contacted us so far have been small to medium in size but we have a good range of generalist and specialist sites.

We now have a good basis to test our model but please contact us if you would like to help us by giving us access to your performance data.