Well-thought-out management strategies are key to creating reliable and cost-effective programs for an organization’s most important areas of spend. Yet, for some reason, when it comes to managing the non-employee workforce, businesses are still implementing ineffective and fragmented processes.
The problem is, many organizations are still managing their growing contingent workforce on manual spreadsheets, in-house databases or Sharepoint-like websites.
Unfortunately, these methods are ineffective and almost always lead to a lack of visibility into your overall contingent workforce management program, including no real visibility into vendor performance or program spend.
This leads to rogue spend within your non-employee workforce program, inconsistent hiring across your organization, inconsistent vendor standards, poor staffing agency choices, inefficient processes, as well as low-quality workers being placed within your business.
In fact, for a more detailed summary of why manual spreadsheets are such an ineffective management method for your contingent workforce, read our blog - 5 Dangers of Using Manual Spreadsheets to Manage Staffing Vendors.
So, with all of this in mind, what does your organization need to build a successful non-employee workforce management strategy?
What you need for a successful non-employee workforce management strategy
Building a successful contingent hiring strategy that ensures your organization partners with the right staffing agencies and hires the right non-employee workers to meet your workforce requirements can be complex.
Yet with the right processes, management technologies and KPIs in place, you can make contingent workforce management a seamless program that ties directly into your company’s growth strategy.
Here are a few crucial aspects of any success non-employee workforce strategy:
- The overarching business objectives that your business is expecting to achieve through the use of contingent workers.
- Deliverables that your staffing agencies must achieve.
- A clear understanding of current organizational spend.
- A defined set of KPIs to measure staffing vendor performance.
- A centralized platform to store vendor and contingent workforce data.
- Frequent reviews of your contingent workforce management program’s effectiveness.
Most importantly is the implementation of a vendor management system (VMS) to better manage and centralize your entire contingent workforce program. This can drive significant soft and hard savings for your business.
How a VMS will improve your contingent workforce management
A VMS is a powerful cloud and web-based software solution that enables your company to automate and centralize your entire non-employee workforce data, including the staffing agencies you partner with, in one easy-to-use platform.
A vendor management system allows your business to manage the entire non-employee hiring and management process, from engaging a staffing agency, sourcing temps and independent contractors, onboarding non-employee workers, time entry, approval, invoicing and much more!
Here are just a few of the ways in which the use of a VMS will help your business to build a successful contingent workforce management strategy:
1 - Create a central records of vendors and contracts
To truly understand how your staffing agencies are providing your organization with ROI, it’s crucial that you consolidate your vendors as well as all other data associated with your non-employee workforce.
A VMS will consolidate all vendors and transactions into one easy-to-view location, giving you clear insight into how much you are spending on your program and how your vendors are performing. Creating a central record of vendors and contracts will ensure your business is able to minimize vendor risk and rogue spend.
2 - Automate time-consuming processes
Want to remove costly human errors from your contingent workforce management processes, as well as access soft savings by significantly improving how efficient your hiring managers work?
A vendor management system automates the entire vendor process associated with your non-employee workforce. That includes every step from sourcing, onboarding, analyzing vendor performance, payments and many other processes. This both saves your hiring managers time, and ensures the data in your system is accurate and up-to-date.
3 - Assess vendor spend
Hidden and indirect spend can dramatically drive up costs across your business and reduce how effective your non-employee management program is. A vendor management system will give you clear insight into how much you are spending on staffing agencies. You can then use this data to adjust vendor spend accordingly, ensuring your business is accessing the workforce quality it’s paying for.
4 - Use centralized data to measure vendor performance
Since a VMS centralizes all of your staffing agency data into one platform, you can easily monitor and track staffing agency performance across your entire organization.
This complete visibility into vendor performance gives your organization the ability to analyze vendor performance metrics and data, ensuring the staffing agencies you use are helping your business to meet its workforce targets and overarching business goals.
Want to learn more about how a vendor management system can help your company improve how it manages its non-employee workforce and staffing vendors? Contact Conexis VMS today.
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