You are buying an outcome, not attendance
Contract hire gives you people under your direction and leaves you managing them. Managed workforce is different: we employ the team, schedule it, supervise it, quality-control its output and pay it - and we are measured on delivery against a statement of work rather than on hours present.
That distinction matters commercially because it removes the agency margin layer. We are the employer, so there is no third party taking a percentage between your budget and the person doing the work. It matters operationally because a named Cogent delivery manager owns utilisation, conduct, certification currency and the client interface - not a coordinator forwarding your emails to contractors.
Cogent Networks' value here is structural, not promotional. It comes from being the employer, owning the platform, and governing the delivery.
Dedicated or designated
Both are managed workforce. The difference is whether the capacity is exclusively yours or guaranteed-available to you.
| DEDICATED | DESIGNATED | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Named workers assigned full time to your account and nothing else | Named workers guaranteed available to your account at an agreed utilisation level |
| Cost model | Fixed monthly cost per FTE, shift pattern dependent | Committed monthly allocation with overage at an agreed rate |
| Ramp | Sourced or assigned then onboarded to your estate - typically 2 to 6 weeks | Faster where the tier exists on the standing workforce - often days |
| Flexibility | Lower - the commitment is the point; changes handled at review points | Higher - allocation flexes within the committed envelope |
| Best for | Continuous programmes, resident site presence, deep estate knowledge | Variable demand with a reliable floor, multi-site coverage |
| Knowledge retention | Highest - the same people, learning your estate over time | High - a named pool rather than whoever is free |
Most engagements end up as a mix: dedicated for the primary site or programme, designated for the surrounding estate. Utilisation is visible in the portal so the split can be right-sized at renewal rather than guessed.
What you look at, not what you ask for
Active FTEs, timesheet approval, pending approvals and engagement margin health - live in the portal rather than assembled monthly.
The tooling the team actually works in
Per-ticket PWA
A progressive web app per job: chat scoped to the work order, task list, GPS check-in and check-out. Offline-capable for basements, plant rooms and equipment halls.
Site Visit Report & signature
Every visit produces an SVR with photographic evidence and a mobile customer signature before the worker can close the job.
Resource schedule optimisation
Rotas and dispatch built against skill, tier, clearance validity, travel time and cover requirements rather than availability alone.
Asset & tooling management
What each worker holds - devices, test kit, PPE, keys and access cards - tracked at serial level against the worker record.
Bill audit & pay
Real-time multi-party billing analytics across order-to-cash and source-to-pay, multi-entity and multi-currency across 19 entities.
Performance & QA
Health checks, SLA metrics, root-cause analysis and corrective actions tracked to closure by the delivery manager.
White-glove governance, on a rhythm
Three meetings and three escalation levels. Unglamorous, and the reason multi-country programmes do not drift.
Track-level meeting
Track lead and business analyst. Reviews the action and issue log, clears blockers at source, and updates the delivery position for the week.
Weekly core team meeting
Core team across tracks. Project plan and release updates, dependency management, and anything needing PMO arbitration.
Monthly steering committee
Executive sponsors on both sides. Commercial and scope decisions taken and recorded as a decision record, not minutes.
Three escalation levels
Each with an owner, a turnaround and a documented output - so an escalation produces a decision rather than a longer call.
Every level carries a named owner, a 72-hour turnaround on action items, a documented output and a full immutable audit trail against the defined service levels. Nothing escalates informally.
Employing people where you cannot
Employer of record
Where you have no legal entity in a country, we employ the worker through ours - compliantly, on local terms, with the statutory obligations sitting with us.
TUPE & rebadging
Where an incumbent's staff transfer to us, we run the process properly rather than treating it as a payroll change.
Payroll bureau
Multi-country payroll as a service, whether or not we supply the workers - reconciled against delivered work rather than run in isolation.
Source, engage, manage, pay
What a managed engagement commits to
| SERVICE LEVEL | COMMITMENT | MEASURED AS |
|---|---|---|
| Utilisation | Agreed utilisation floor per FTE or per designated allocation | Hours delivered against committed hours, monthly |
| Timesheet cadence | Weekly submit, approve and invoice cycle | Approval rate without query, and days to invoice |
| Cover plans | Named cover for planned and unplanned absence within the agreed window | Shifts covered against shifts scheduled |
| Certification currency | No worker scheduled against an expired clearance or certification | Blocked-dispatch events and expiry remediation time |
| Escalation turnaround | 72 hours on action items at L1, L2 and L3 | Hours from raise to documented action |
| Governance cadence | Weekly track, bi-weekly core, monthly steering - held, minuted, actioned | Meetings held against meetings scheduled |
| EOR setup | 10 working days from instruction to compliant engagement | Days to first contracted day |
| Reporting | Monthly pack plus live portal access, reviewed quarterly at QBR | Pack issued by agreed date each month |
Measured in Cogent OS against an immutable audit trail. Service credits, where contracted, are calculated from the same records visible to you in the portal.
Engagement health
A delivered programme
A global automotive-parts manufacturer needed a managed technical workforce across 21 countries - a mixed model of fixed-term full-time workers, designated named resources guaranteed to the account, and on-call cover. Every worker was named, not interchangeable, and in most markets native-language workers were a hard requirement.
We supplied and ran the entire model. In Europe, we operated under strict health-and-safety regimes and coordinated directly with the end customer's health-and-safety management company for site compliance. In several EU countries the engagement ran through our employer-of-record service - workers transferred onto Cogent employment in-country, with contracts, benefits and statutory filings handled by our local entities.
Cogent delivered, managed and governed everything: 430 workers across 189 sites, scheduled, tracked and paid through Cogent OS, at 100% utilisation. One partner, one bill, twenty-one countries of employment law handled.
Anonymised by agreement. Client names available under NDA.
Questions buyers ask
What is the real difference from contract hire?
Accountability. With contract hire you direct the work and carry the management overhead; if someone underperforms, that is your problem to manage. With managed workforce we are contracted to an outcome under a statement of work, with a named delivery manager, agreed service levels and a quality loop. Underperformance, absence and cover are ours to solve.
Which countries can you act as employer of record in?
Nineteen. That sits alongside the nineteen countries where we already hold a full operating entity, so between direct employment and employer of record the coverage is broad. Where we have an entity, engagement is direct employment; where we do not, EOR gives you a compliant route without incorporating. Setup runs to a ten-working-day commitment from instruction, and we will always tell you which of the two routes applies before you sign.
Can you take on our existing contractor population?
Yes, either by transferring them onto Cogent employment contracts in the relevant country or by running them under EOR. Where TUPE or a local equivalent applies we manage the process with legal and HR support, including consultation, and preserve continuity of service. We will also be direct where a transfer is not actually in scope rather than letting the assumption ride into the plan.
How is the engagement governed?
On a fixed cadence: weekly track-level meetings with the action and issue log, bi-weekly core team meetings covering plan and releases, and a monthly steering committee with executive sponsors where decisions are recorded. Escalation runs L1 track leads, L2 PMO, L3 steering, each with an owner and a 72-hour action turnaround.
What happens when the engagement ends?
Ramp-down is planned rather than improvised. Notice periods, redeployment of workers onto our other accounts, asset and clearance recovery, knowledge handover and documentation are part of the engagement. The wind-down does not become your HR problem or leave undocumented gaps in your estate.
Other service lines in this practice
Need a team, not a stack of CVs?
Tell us the scope, the countries and the service levels. We will propose dedicated, designated or EOR - and say which parts of the demand suit which model.