Are you frustrated with managing your contingent workforce in your warehouse using manual spreadsheets, and facing issues like slow and inefficient fill rates, subpar workforce quality, unexpected costs, and disorganized processes throughout? In this article, we look at how a vendor management system can help you better manage your warehouse contingent workforce.
Utilizing temporary workers in your warehouse offers numerous advantages that support your organization in reaching its business objectives. We recognize that employing temporary workers in your warehouse provides several benefits, such as:
Workforce flexibility: Hiring full-time employees unnecessarily wastes money and cuts profits, while insufficient staffing harms customer experience. Temp labor offers flexibility to meet seasonal demands and business fluctuations, providing the needed headcount when required.
Save your business time and money: Recruiting full-time workers is costly and time-consuming, especially with high turnover rates. Temp labor provides experienced candidates without these expenses.
Access to qualified candidates: Need a worker with specific skills like forklift operation or packing? Staffing agencies have a vast database of qualified candidates.
Turnover reduction: Another major benefit for warehouse managers is reducing turnover. High turnover, sometimes over 80%, leads to customer satisfaction issues and extra costs. Successful temp workers can significantly lower turnover.
The optimal solution for managing your Contingent Labor is a Vendor Management System (VMS). Let's explore what a Vendor Management System is, along with its benefits, costs, and implementation process.
What is VMS software?
Vendor management software, commonly referred to as VMS software, is a cloud-based platform designed to help your business acquire and oversee contingent workers and the channels that provide them, such as staffing agencies.
Implementing VMS software enables your organization to efficiently manage and acquire contingent workers, oversee staffing agencies, and, in some instances, handle permanent employees hired through a staffing agency.
VMS software facilitates the management of worker procurement, evaluation of vendor performance, onboarding of contingent and contract workers, payment tracking, and various other processes associated with your contingent workforce.
Read more at: What is a VMS?
What are the benefits of using VMS software?
Utilizing a VMS system to centralize all vendor information in one location allows your business to experience a wide array of advantages. Here are some of the main benefits.
✔️ Gain complete visibility of your contingent workforce: A VMS system gives you complete visibility and control over your contingent workforce program. You’ll know where you're spending money, how your vendors are performing, how you are classifying workers and where you can make changes to optimize your entire contingent workforce program.
✔️ Improved efficiencies: Move away from manual, time-consuming and simply ineffective spreadsheets to an automated platform that improves ROI. VMS software automates processes such as sourcing, onboarding, time entry and approval, payments and many other tasks so you can focus on the core competencies that drive true business growth.
✔️ Reduce Risk: Avoid hefty fines and legal costs by ensuring you are classifying your non-employee workers correctly. A VMS solution gives you the tools you need to properly track, report and mitigate tenure, co-employment and risks associated with worker classifications.
✔️ Reduce contingent workforce spend: The most obvious benefit of a VMS is to reduce your overall contingent workforce spend. A VMS gives you full visibility to costs allowing you to identify areas of potential cost reduction. A VMS system brings your entire company on board enabling hiring managers to ensure they are paying market rates to staffing agencies when sourcing nontraditional workers.
Read more at: What are the Benefits of a VMS?
How much does VMS software cost?
Conventional vendor management software providers require significant time and expense for both implementation and maintenance. Their pricing typically depends on a percentage of a company's contingent workforce expenditure. These costs can rapidly accumulate, significantly affecting the return on investment you gain from utilizing a VMS system.
Conexis VMS has changed the game by providing our clients with the option to pay a flat monthly fee. Our software as a service (SaaS) model which means we’re the very first vendor management system designed with no minimum spend requirements. Just pay the license fee every month and the system is yours.
Read more at: "How much does a VMS cost?"
How long does VMS software take to implement?
If your contingent workforce program and staffing agency management are visibly struggling, your organization will likely want to integrate a VMS system into your business promptly.
Implementing VMS software can range from straightforward to complicated, depending on the functionalities you require, the integrations you need, and the provider you choose to collaborate with.
Read more at: "How long Does it Take to Implement a VMS?"
Here are six reasons why your company will benefit from implementing vendor management software instead of relying on labor-intensive, 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 your contingent workforce program is performing, 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.
Additional Benefits that Conexis VMS can bring to Managing Contingent Workers in a Warehouse:
Light Industrial workers make up over 60% of the Conexis population. Conexis has developed VMS functionality specifically to support high volume worker environments such as digital site rosters, easy time clock integrations and native shift functionality. Our clients love us because Conexis enables them to do their job faster and get better quality workers, who stay through their assignments more often.
Learn about our expertise in: Manufacturing & Light Industrial, Warehouse & Logistics
1 - Reducing No Shows and Turnover - When your workers fail to show up or leave their jobs early, it dramatically increases your expenses, diminishes business efficiency and jeopardizes your entire customer experience. Conexis VMS deeply understands the intricacies and challenges associated with managing a contingent workforce. That’s why we built our easy-to-use Vendor Management System (VMS). Conexis VMS clients tell us that after implementing Conexis their no-shows and turnover have dropped by over 50%.
2 - Time and Attendance Integrations - Conexis not only integrates with your warehouse time clock system, but we can also supply the system. Regardless of the time clock system that your business uses, Conexis VMS has worked with, and integrates easily with, most time clock systems on the market today.
Read more at: Launching a Time Clock System? 5 Must-Know Tips!
3 - Native Shift Functionality - No matter what type of shift-based workers you use (warehouse, logistics, healthcare, call centers) where shifts are used on different days and times, tracking varying schedules, pay rates, supplier markups, and compliance requirements can quickly become overwhelming without the right tools in place. A robust vendor management system (VMS) designed with native shift functionality helps ensure these variables stay organized while providing a clear audit trail for payroll and billing.
Read more at: 5 Ways a VMS Helps you Manage Shift Based Workers
Getting Started with a Vendor Management System
Learn more about the Benefits of a Vendor Management System and what to look for when choosing the best VMS for your organization. Download our Free VMS Buyer's Guide here:
Take the Next Step with Conexis VMS
Conexis is an award-winning VMS tailored specifically for mid-market contingent workforce programs. Leveraging the latest technology, Conexis delivers the expertise, reliability and security of enterprise systems, while offering the flexibility, user friendliness and tailored service you require. Conexis delivers enterprise level software - without the enterprise level complexity and cost.
Learn more about our Company and why organizations Choose Conexis VMS.
Contact Us
Whether you are looking to change your VMS solution, or just getting started, we are here to help. Contact Us for a Free No-Obligation Consultation to discuss your workforce challenges (and get immediate actionable insights). See how easy Conexis is to use by taking a quick 2 minute Self-Guided Tour, or Book a Personal Demo Today!
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