The Stars Labor app, simply put, is an efficient, streamlined, and convenient tool for managing and communicating with staff. It allows users to handle staffing and labor management easily and with its web-based tools, labor providers can communicate with staff from anywhere. The app has been designed by people who have worked managing labor for the live entertainment and event industry and the Stars Labor team’s experience has resulted in an app that is readily suited to the industry’s labor management needs. With the goal of efficient labor management, Stars’ reduces paperwork and increases productivity, Stars keeps the details all in one place so you’re never without some critical information that might be at the office or another location. Powered by Synchronous, the app is a web-based system backed by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s iOS and Android compatible and can be downloaded easily from Google Play or Apple’s App Store.
Developing a Solution
“The basic idea of Stars started in about 2014,” says Ben Ralston, President of Stars Labor. “We were at the Las Vegas Convention Center and trying to find a solution to handle large amounts of labor quickly and easily. Something that would reduce double entry; allow for exporting to various accounting applications, and things like that. We looked at a number of solutions that were on the market, and after you added up all the money that you would spend trying to make it work for what our situation required, we said, ‘well, why don’t we just make our own?’” After a few initial designs, they changed direction and became completely cloud-based, hosted on AWS. Stars became a web app at that point and developed from there.
Now with the Stars Labor app developed and being used, Ralston explains some details of its use. “Stars Labor is a labor management and time tracking program. It’s cloud-based so that anybody can log into it from anywhere, it works everywhere that the internet is. Then it has a companion Apple’ iOS and Android app for scanning people in and out as well as accepting dispatches from whatever company is using it. It also gives a simple and easy to use work history for the worker to see, as well as a number of other tools on the way, such as cert tracking and other things for the actual individual worker.”
From a management standpoint, the actual web app allows a straightforward way to look at your labor plan for the day and get that organized for anywhere from one person to 500-people, to 1,000-people. Continues Ralston, “You create your labor plan, you can use dispatch, you have a number of forms that you can have come out of the labor plan, whether it be like a sign in sheet, whether it be some sort of roster that you need to give to a third party, or share with other workers. At that point, the workers come in, scan in either by a QR code, a kiosk, etc. There are a number of other ways that people ask us to provide for signing in. The main thing is that we try and be as flexible as possible. We understand that everybody’s situation is a little different, if you’re dealing with people working at music festivals versus people that are working conventions versus events or long running shows on the Vegas strip or Broadway. Union or non-union labor. It’s mostly the same, but the slight differences is why we do have the ability to handle various situations. We want to be flexible so Stars is easy to use for both management and the workers.”
Tracking Time
A key feature of the Stars Labor app is time tracking, an area where they again have worked to remove double entry and have automated about 95% of time tracking. “Everybody has their rules that they follow, whether it be an eight-hour day or eight regular hours, four hours overtime, four hours double time, or any number of various overtime rules that we’ve seen across the country,” notes Ralston. “We realized that if we can automate about 95% of those tasks, then the rest of it you can just tweak as much as you need. You can then take that data and export it to either an accounting application, a payroll application, or a payroll service, etc. We allow you to have several different types of forms and information. Then it’s all custom reports at that point, because nobody really uses the same ones; everyone has their own needs. That is why we’ve developed some as a starting point and users can then customize them as needed to individual situations and needs.”
Once you delve into the Stars Labor app, it is obvious it has been developed by a team that has worked in production for the live entertainment industry. “I know that it’s a popular catch phrase, but we really are in the industry and are production people,” says Ralston. “There are some shotgun applications on the market that try to solve time tracking for every industry; a one size fits all approach. There are also customized solutions where they do one part of the job well, but they don’t do the rest of the needs well. What we try to do is think about everything we’ve run into from a production standpoint; all aspects of the labor management job. For example, I had an idea for document storage in the program, so you could easily attach documents to a project and always be able to get to them from within Stars. You never have to search through separate emails, folders, or whatever. We made some documents with an option where you click it and whenever you dispatch workers, those documents will go out to them. Whatever the worker package is, be it a parking pass, a site plan, maybe an OSHA statement, or whatever information you want to get to the worker. We want to develop solutions that address each customer’s set of needs but isn’t so nuanced that it only works for a particular customer. It handles all the aspects of labor management and is also easily customizable as much or as little as someone needs for their project.”
Simple Interface
Ralston and the Stars Labor team understood that they had to make it easy for workers to interface with the app, not just the managers. “All the worker needs to do is install the Stars app on their phone,” points out Ralston. “For example, a customer gets Stars, then they can send out an onboarding link to everybody via SMS [text] or email. Or when the workers show up to the work site, the customer can have a QR code sheet where the worker uses their phone’s camera to go to the app store, install the app and easily create an account. Let’s say that worker works for multiple different companies that each have Stars, the worker doesn’t have to navigate different methods of time tracking. They just show up and scan in and out through whatever method that customer is using provided by Stars; swipe in/out, use a kiosk, however the customer wants.”
Ralston feels that the core Stars customer is one who does about a million dollars in labor for a year, “but it’s designed for much bigger companies too,” he says. “One of the first uses was at the Las Vegas Convention Center with some larger conventions like CES and SEMA where they have anywhere from 300 to 500 workers a day. The app made it quick and easy to generate the labor plan; to put the workers in there and go. If you’re doing handwritten timecards, which a lot of people still do these days, it takes hours. And then putting that data into a system and everything; it’s onerous. Stars cuts all that work down and gives the power to the labor manager or supervisor to generate a labor plan in a couple of hours for the next day. They can also easily see the people there that are working. It doesn’t matter if it’s one worker, 500, or 1,000, we know that Stars needs to work just the same; just as efficiently, and it does. It’s a tool to help managers do their job. Stars helps you to manage your staff, your labor—be it union or non-union, and gives you the options to do more of the different parts of that job in an efficient way. It takes away all the tedious double entry and other inefficient parts of the job are reduced.”
Ralston concludes by noting Stars continues to develop. “We’re constantly building on the Stars Labor base we created, working on different pieces for everybody. We have a very robust road map ahead of us.” Certainly anyone in the Live Entertainment industry dealing with labor management for a project or company should take a look at the Stars Labor app. It may well be the labor solution you need.
