Insights from Vendor Management Systems: Optimizing Your Workforce

Businesses all over the world are benefiting from the growing use of non-employee workers. Employers are gaining access to more talent and reducing their costs while becoming more agile.

Despite the benefits, this pattern has created new challenges, in management, reporting and strategic planning. In response, many organisations are adopting solutions such as Vendor Management Systems (VMS). These systems help organisations engage, manage and report on their external workforce and also deliver other capabilities.

In this article we are going to illustrate how their reporting capabilities give you the insights you need to optimise your workforce and ensure your compliance, tax and accounting conform with your legal and quality requirements.

What is the composition of your non-employee workforce?

Your workforce needs to align with your strategic goals. Otherwise, the composition of your workforce could be hindering progress towards your bigger ambitions. To achieve effective alignment, you need to understand the composition of your non-employee workforce, the kinds of work they do and their impact.

By using a VMS, you will be able to track and manage all categories of non-employees, including temporary workers, consultants and contractors. With this information to hand, you will be able to focus on deriving the most value from your contingent staff and associated contracts. With advanced analytics capabilities, you will also be able to understand:

• Which suppliers can offer you qualified, high-calibre candidates the fastest?
• Which non-employee worker categories provide the highest quality work?
• Whether time-and-materials contractors outperform fixed-price, statement of work (SOW) contractors.
• Whether you are overly reliant on a particular supplier and what risk that poses to your organisation?

Who has access to your assets at any one time?

At a micro-level, a VMS helps you understand who has access to your organisational assets. On an individual or category basis, you can review worker locations, projects and access privileges to data, systems and facilities.

This is instrumental for organisations with compliance, information security and quality management concerns.

How can we be sure this access is discontinued when their assignments are completed?

Some categories of non-employees are commonly overlooked for compliance purposes. Service workers and retainer-based consultants, for example, need to be accounted for, with a full audit trail to demonstrate compliance.

To track members of the non-employee workforce easily, you need a VMS. This will enable you to identify them, provide visibility on their responsibilities and track their contracts. When access is planned to be discontinued, you can execute a workflow that informs the relevant stakeholders to update their access rights.

Are non-employees correctly classified for tax purposes?

Worker misclassification has been an issue in the contingent workforce for a long time. Recently, the importance has grown significantly, with Governments, Human Resources departments and the movement towards total workforce management all pushing this further up the agenda.

In law, regulations such as IR35 in the United Kingdom and DBA in the Netherlands, place the impetus firmly on organisations to manage the tax status of their non-employee workforce. For each territory, the rules differ somewhat, which adds to the complexity of managing an international workforce – and this is where a VMS will provide visibility, clarity and verification of compliance.

To achieve this, a VMS helps create practical, robust and auditable processes for managing the tax status of your global contingent workforce.

Are we paying too much for certain skill sets?

Contingent workforces allow you to respond flexibly to demand and project requirements. Without the right information to hand, you can end up overpaying for talent and increasing your costs.

A VMS helps you understand the complexity and variety of contractual relationships you hold with suppliers. It helps you procure and negotiate with suppliers and even reduce your administrative overhead by automating work. It also offers:

• Tools that allow you to competitively source suppliers and talent, allowing you to maintain or improve your service quality.
• Benchmark and use historical data to manage your costs closely.
• Draft statements of work (SOW) on your terms, reducing your risk as a buyer

Learn more: Six things a VMS empowers corporate businesses to do quickly and efficiently.

Are we deploying our contingent workforce strategically?

 The best organisations can report on historical performance and look into the future to ascertain their workforce requirements.

A VMS can harness big data, which can be used to analyse your current and future human capital requirements. Based on this information, you can begin to understand the optimum mix of employee and non-employee labour to execute your strategic plan by:

• Segmenting your workforce
• Gauging internal and external labour markets
• Benchmarking historical performance against future requirements
• Forecasting your non-employee labour requirements

Look no further than Beeline

Beeline solutions go far beyond a VMS and uniquely leverage your internal data to produce insightful, actionable reports that help you identify bottlenecks, plan for the future and give you an unprecedented level of visibility into your non-employee workforce.

The Beeline platform offers you the data you need to adopt a data-driven approach to your business strategy. For more information about how Beeline can help you answer each of the questions above, get in touch with our specialists or book a customized demo.