Great Lakes Ag Labor Services Portal

Objective: One system of record for a complex, high-stakes process

Great Lakes Ag Labor Services was founded by Michigan Farm Bureau in 2014 to help farms solve a problem that threatens every harvest: finding enough seasonal workers. Today it is the largest H-2A contract filer in Michigan and serves farms across Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Texas as a full-service agent for the federal guest-worker program, handling employer education, application processing, legal review, recruitment coordination, visas, transportation, and worker orientation.

Every one of those contracts touches multiple government agencies, partner recruiters, consulates, transportation providers, the employer, and the workers themselves, on deadlines that don’t move. GLALS was running it all on spreadsheets and email threads. As the organization grew, it needed a single system of record that internal staff, partner recruiters, employers, and workers could all work from, each seeing exactly what they should.

What Web Ascender Did

Web Ascender designed and built a multi-tenant web application that manages the full lifecycle of a seasonal agricultural labor contract, from employer intake through worker recruitment, visa processing, arrival, and onboarding. It’s three distinct applications on one codebase.

Staff portal

• Prospects and sales - track leads and sales activity through to signed employer accounts and contracts
• Regulatory milestones - follow each contract step by step through the labor and immigration agencies involved, so nothing slips past a filing deadline
• Worker roster and assignments - manage every worker and their contract assignments across seasons and employers
• Logistics - coordinate consulate appointments, border crossings, and charter transportation, and log every communication along the way
• Billing - generate invoices and expense reports directly from contract data

Employer portal

• Their contracts, and only theirs - role-based access scoped so each farm sees its own contracts, rosters, and documents
• Request workers - ask for returning workers or new positions without a phone call
• Status at a glance - worker rosters with current status, generated documents ready to download, invoices, and a place to submit transportation expenses

Worker onboarding

• A magic link, not an account - workers receive a link by email or WhatsApp and authenticate with a one-time code from their phone
• Configurable onboarding flows - staff design onboarding journeys with a drag-and-drop page builder and track completion for every worker
• Multi-language by design - full translation support with editable translations, so workers onboard in their own language

Under the hood

• A document engine that fills PDF forms, renders DOCX and rich-text templates, and builds CSV exports from a template library using a safe templating language
• Bulk email and SMS campaigns with two-way messaging through a telephony provider
• Enterprise security - single sign-on for staff via SAML and OpenID Connect, two-factor authentication, encrypted storage of sensitive personal identifiers, and a full audit trail of record changes
• Background processing for document generation, notifications, and scheduled maintenance, deployed through automated GitHub Actions pipelines on Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and Hotwire

The Outcome

Since 2018, GLALS has run its entire operation from one platform. Staff see every contract’s place in the regulatory process and every worker’s place in the pipeline. Employers get answers from a portal instead of a phone call. Workers, many of them thousands of miles away with nothing but a phone, complete their paperwork from a text message. And because the platform is multi-tenant, it’s built to serve the organizations and states GLALS grows into next.

Web Ascender also designed and built the GLALS marketing website, the public front door to the portal.