When it comes to managing vendors within their non-employee workforce, a large number of organizations rely on manual spreadsheets, in-house databases or Sharepoint-like websites because they think it’s more cost-effective and more accessible than a vendor management system (VMS).
This is a mistake. Use of manual spreadsheets result in a significant lack of visibility into your non-employee workforce program, resulting in challenges such as rogue spend, inconsistent hiring, poor staffing agency choices, inefficient processes and low quality workers being placed in your organization.
With no real visibility into these challenges, a manual spreadsheet will prevent your business from ever reducing costs and improving workforce quality.
Thankfully, your company can avoid these issues through the use of vendor management software. A VMS will prove to be a huge ROI to your business, improving visibility into your contingent workforce program, consolidating your staffing vendors, automating processes and helping you to measure performance.
Here are six reasons why your company will benefit from the use of vendor management software over time-consuming, manual spreadsheets:
#1 - Reduce vendor risk with standardized assessments
One of the biggest challenges that organizations face when it comes to their non-employee workforce is fragmented processes. Without company-wide centralization, team leaders across different departments typically develop their own approach to assessing vendors and sourcing temporary workers or independent contractors.
A vendor management system allows your business to create a centralized strategy for all departments, using the same vendor management software to standardize and define success factors across your company. This ensures all hiring managers in your organization use the same scale to evaluate vendors.
#2 - Gain complete visibility into your non-employee workforce program
Most companies want to lower costs and improve quality within their non-employee workforce program. Without having visibility into how the program is performing, however, your organization stands no chance of improving its results.
Unlike manual spreadsheets, a VMS will give you complete control and visibility of your non-employee workforce program. With this visibility, you can use insightful KPIs and metrics to optimize and improve your program, ensuring business growth and greater profitability.
#3 - Centralized data means you’ll never have to worry about accessing the wrong spreadsheet
There’s a wide number of people involved in vendor management, whether it’s a HR team, a procurement employee, a company executive or department managers who are looking to hire temporary workers. When using manual spreadsheets, any one of these people could maintain their own files - which may or may not be regularly updated.
Even if a common spreadsheet is shared throughout your organization, it could be downloaded and saved to individual hard drives, creating multiple copies of the same document. Each time someone changes this document on their own device, your company loses a little more visibility into how its vendors are performing.
A VMS centralizes your entire non-employee workforce program, and consolidates all vendor information in one location. The result? Everyone in your organization is working from the same information in real-time, no matter where they are accessing the data from.
#4 - Eliminate those costly mistakes
A spreadsheet is a complete blank slate, and users can type any information they want into it. There’s no denying that human errors occur, and they can have a huge impact on how a company analyzes performance. One wrong formula or field entered, and a manual spreadsheet can be riddled with errors that aren’t clearly visible.
Through the use of automation, a vendor management system will eliminate those human errors that can throw your contingent workforce program completely off-track.
#5 - Better monitor and track vendor performance
As we’ve mentioned, the use of spreadsheets typically results in a lack of visibility into your non-employee workforce program. As a result, your organization will have no real data to analyze vendor performance.
A vendor management system ensures you are able to properly monitor and track the performance of your vendors, giving you unique visibility into key performance indicators such as time-to-fill, time-to-submit and turnover. These KPIs can be used to improve your vendor decisions moving forward, ultimately improving the quality of your non-employees.
#6 - Improve your internal efficiencies
Spreadsheets are not only an ineffective way of managing your staffing agencies, they’re also time-consuming. The use of a vendor management system will automate internal processes and allow your business to implement consistent procedures across your entire organization.
With no more fragmented processes across your business or hiring managers spending countless hours manually entering in vendor information, a VMS helps your business improve internal operations, save money and focus time back on the core business functions that promote growth.
Want to learn more about the benefits of a vendor management system, and how using one can improve the quality of your non-employee workforce program? Contact Conexis VMS today. We’ve developed a VMS specifically for the requirements of companies with lower contingent workforce budgets.
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