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MSP vs VMS: What's the Difference?

Written by Wayne Burgess | Jan 4, 2025 11:17:26 PM

The future of work is increasingly centered around contingent labor. The number of consultants, freelancers, contractors, temporary workers, and other non-employee roles is rising rapidly. This makes their management essential, but a common question is what is the difference between a Managed Service Provider and a Vendor Management System? 

Contingent Workers offer incredible benefits for your company. They help you reduce costs, find diverse and highly-skilled workers even when your industry is experiencing a skills shortage, and they give your organization the flexibility it needs to shift quickly depending on new projects or business goals. 

But to gain these benefits you must manage your contingent workforce correctly. That's where a key question is asked: Managed Service Provider Vs Vendor Management System?

The growing use of the contingent workforce means you can no longer rely on manual management methods

The increased use of contingent workers means it’s no longer feasible for your organization to continue managing them, as well as the vendors you use to source and engage them, with manual and time-consuming spreadsheets, in-house databases or SharePoint-like websites

These manual processes of managing your non-employee workforce and vendor management relationships are inefficient and lead to a range of hidden costs and waste time for your business. 

Failure to automate and centralize how you manage your non-employee workforce will lead your business to overpaying staffing vendors, wasting time on inefficient processes, lacking visibility into your contingent workforce, as well as many other things that impact your bottom line. 

Thankfully, alongside the growth of the contingent workforce is a growing suite of supporting technologies and outsourced experts that can help your business attract, engage and manage non-employee workers and manage your relationships with the vendors you use to source them.

          What is a Managed Service Provider (MSP)? 

A managed service provider is the practice of outsourcing the responsibility for your organization’s entire contingent workforce management program. From setting up the program, interacting with vendors, hiring, contracting, onboarding, offboarding, billing and much more.

An MSP is a third-party which takes over the responsibility of your external workforce management completely from your company’s HR and procurement teams.

          What is a Vendor Management System (VMS)?

A vendor management system is a cloud-based technology that acts as a mechanism for your business to procure and manage your non-employee workforce. It supports your company in structuring and optimizing every process related to contingent workforce management.

A VMS solution will consolidate your entire contingent workforce management strategy into one centralized location. This includes everything from vendor relationships and performance, to every process concerning the sourcing, hiring, tracking and invoicing for temporary workers. 

To learn more, you can read:

           MSP, VMS or Both?

While many companies employ an MSP and a VMS together to get the full benefit of outsourcing.  Outsourcing your contingent workforce management program to an MSP, in many cases, can have a lot of benefits but can also be a larger undertaking.

Organizations that want to continue to manage the actual hiring of contractors in-house may opt to use just a VMS solution to automate and centralize their external workforce management processes. A VMS will collect requisitions from managers, automate transactions, facilitate onboarding and consolidate your vendors in one location. A VMS stores all of this data (and much more) to support each stage of your non-employee workforce management process. 

These optimized processes lead to improved visibility into your contingent workforce, increased efficiencies, consolidation of vendors, better reporting and analytics of vendor relationships, as well as increased cost savings.

To learn more, you can read:

About Conexis VMS

Conexis VMS is a robust, cloud-based, mobile-friendly software application that empowers your company to streamline and oversee your entire contingent workforce, regardless of the diverse skill sets you require. Our award-winning Vendor Management System is the the most modern and advanced VMS tech stack available today that has been built with the user in mind. It starts with the latest codebase and extends to our lightning-fast AWS microservice infrastructure. Add to that our Open API and Software Development Kit (SDK), making Conexis the lights-out leader in VMS technology. We provide the easiest, fastest, most modern, sophisticated, and flexible VMS on the market today.

Learn more about our company and why organizations are choosing Conexis VMS.

Contact Us

Whether you are in the market for a new VMS Solution, or just getting started, we are here to help.  See how easy Conexis is to use by taking a quick 2 minute Self-Guided Tour.  Contact Us for a Free No-Obligation Consultation to discuss your workforce challenges (and get immediate actionable insights) or Book a Personal Demo Today! 

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