22-site veterinary group: 300 hours per month recovered through Ember VMS

A 22-site UK veterinary group came to Ember with a recruitment supply chain that had grown organically with the estate. Each site had built its own roster of preferred agencies, often based on long-standing local relationships. The result: 18 different agencies across the group, each on different commercial terms, each invoicing on different cycles, each managed by a different person on the ground.

The recruitment and finance teams at central HQ had no consolidated view of agency spend, no way to standardise rates across sites, and no audit trail when disputes arose. Time spent reconciling timesheets, chasing CVs, and processing site-by-site invoices was crowding out the strategic work the central team should have been doing.

Ember VMS was rolled out across all 22 sites. Each existing agency was reviewed against the group's new standardised terms and either onboarded to the platform or wound down. The PSL settled at six tier-one agencies — a third of the previous count — with a clear cascading order based on response rate, fill rate, and rate adherence.

The fill rate held. Bank usage rose by 20% against agency fill, as the platform made it easy to cascade jobs to the group's internal locum pool before reaching agency suppliers. Total agency spend across the group fell by 26%.

The operational impact for the central team was the headline: 300 hours per month — roughly 1.7 FTE — of recruitment and finance team time recovered, redirected to higher-value workforce planning and group-level operational projects.

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