5 Ways a Purely Vendor-Neutral, Integrated Contingent Workforce Model Helps Companies Get Peak Value

Companies today are spending significant amounts of money on contingent workers, with businesses allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for these engagements. As a result, the C-suite is increasingly interested in whether they’re getting peak value from their contingent workforce program. And they are right to be concerned - inefficient management, laggard technologies, and disaggregated solutions can thwart efforts to maximize value.

A purely vendor-neutral, integrated MSP and VMS solution provides an innovative way for companies to manage their contingent workforce. Pure vendor neutrality means the MSP or VMS has no affiliation with a staffing agency. Because no one staffing firm is unfairly prioritized, this creates a highly competitive playing field for the staffing firms sourcing talent for organizations that demand a higher caliber of talent.

Since suppliers are focused on providing clients with the best value — which may not be the case when the MSP can compete to fill requisitions — businesses receive the highest-performing talent at the most competitive cost.

Additionally, with an integrated model, the technology and human aspects are intertwined, making it easier for companies to achieve optimal results. Here are five key ways this approach will help businesses get peak value from their contingent workforce program.

1) Risk Management

Worker misclassification enforcement has never been greater than it is today. Between 2011 and 2015, the U.S. federal budget allocated $113 million to detecting and deterring worker misclassification issues. Continuing this trend, the 2017 budget “... expands funding for efforts to ensure that workers receive back wages they are owed and cracks down on the illegal misclassification of some employees as independent contractors …”

Given this uptick in enforcement, having an MSP team well-versed in the complexities of managing worker classification and co-employment risk management can make a huge difference in eliminating issues. To further enhance the MSP team’s efforts in managing business validation, co-employment risk, third-party payrolling of self-sourced contractors and more, organizations need to have access to an integrated, best-in-class VMS platform.

With an integrated platform, the MSP and VMS work in lockstep throughout the entire contingent workforce management process to ensure proper worker classification, onboarding, and worker management. And by pulling all workforce spend into one platform, clients reduce the risk of rogue managers spending randomly and managing contingent workers in an uncontrolled environment.

In addition, businesses with contingent workforces typically have hundreds if not thousands of workers utilizing proprietary corporate networks and systems while accessing their ideas and protocols. A proven MSP team helps ensure the proper nondisclosure agreements are in place to protect a company’s intellectual property.

2) Cost Savings

An integrated solution helps companies generate cost savings in a myriad of ways.

Consolidated invoicing through a VMS reduces instances of billing error, while the aforementioned MSP risk mitigation helps ensure clients avoid costly litigation and misclassification penalties.

Self-sourcing talent is another key way for clients to generate significant hard dollar savings in a large contingent workforce program — especially in more mature programs. A leading-edge joint MSP/VMS offering makes it easy. An expert MSP team can offer a breadth of experience across different industry segments, while an integrated, top-tier VMS will provide self-sourcing capabilities that give businesses the opportunity to avoid traditional supplier-sourced mark-ups and generate cost savings.

In my experience, a company that places 10 self-sourced workers over the course of a year will save, on average, a quarter of a million dollars.

3) Process Efficiency

A fully integrated MSP and VMS solution enables organizations to extract as much value as possible from the latter. With a joint offering, the on-site MSP team of recruitment and employment experts oversees the automation of contingent workforce management processes via the VMS. Users can then tap into the power of automation to reduce the average requisition process from weeks to days. Better still, users can do so knowing they’re getting superior talent at a lower price while managing risk. This efficiency extends through the entire contingent workforce management process, as it enables users to handle sourcing, onboarding, time/project approvals, e-invoicing, offboarding and more in a single application.

This effectiveness provides immediate relief across the entire organization. Human resources, finance, procurement, IT and legal have one system they can go into and extract relevant data to help them work smarter in their area of expertise. In addition, a more sophisticated VMS will be built on open architecture, offer integrations with every major ERP, HRIS and PPM, and have a framework in place for quickly creating custom integrations. As a result, integrations with security, IT, facilities and any other tech systems are simple to implement.

Since workplace efficiency today often involves mobile access, the best VMS solutions enable users to manage the full contingent workforce lifecycle from anywhere they are, powering total freedom of mobility and a seamless omnichannel experience. Top-tier platforms will also bubble up the new action items required to manage a user’s contingent workforce. This helps managers avoid overlooking critical tasks and get more done with fewer swipes and taps.

4) Complete Workforce Visibility

Capturing and harnessing data across each stage in the worker lifecycle is critical, and properly leveraging true business intelligence requires a combination of cutting-edge technology and human expertise. A VMS with real-time visibility into a myriad of dashboards provides executives and other power users with invaluable metrics around worker population, usage, billing, performance and more. With historical data pulled through a single system and presented in a visually friendly, intuitive fashion, clients can make smarter workforce decisions, anticipating and planning for future usage.

Another area that’s vital to managers is Total Talent Management reporting. With the most sophisticated VMS providers, clients gain total visibility into both contingent AND full-time resources across the entire organization. By importing specific types of ‘sanitized’ full-time data and viewing it right next to contingent data, managers can determine the best way to engage resources across all categories from a cost, quality and risk perspective.

With a leading-edge joint MSP/VMS solution, users with specific needs can work with the MSP team to create any executive dashboard desired. These customized dashboards can visually reflect the data points requested and enable the ability to interact with this data in a seemingly endless number of ways.

5) Talent Quality

In today’s business world there’s a war for talent. Taking a vendor-neutral approach through an integrated model is helping companies win every day.

Within a leading-edge VMS, built-in tools deliver additional supplier management assistance. For example, supplier scorecarding offers a mechanism for ranking suppliers, which not only provides valuable feedback but can also help inform future sourcing decisions. In addition, clients can work with their MSP to create a suppler-tiering system, so that new job requisitions are initially routed to first-level suppliers that have historically delivered superior talent.

Conclusion

Superior talent quality, cost efficiency, greater agility, and pure simplicity from a combined solution start at implementation and increase over time. These are wins that cannot be achieved when an MSP and VMS are used separately. A truly integrated and purely vendor-neutral provider offers a one-stop shop for users and enables businesses to realize peak value from their contingent workforce program.