Six things a VMS empowers businesses to do quickly and efficiently

With more businesses leveraging a growing contingent workforce, growing numbers of organisations are beginning to realise the benefits of Vendor Management Systems (VMS).

As well as offering organisations an unprecedented level of visibility into their workforce, a VMS can make a number of highly strategic processes simpler, easier, and more data-driven. This means that:

• You can drive down the costs of your contingent workforce; optimising your budget to work as best it can.
• Your business can reap the benefits of being agile, enabling you to quickly scale the size of your workforce based on the scope of your work.
• You can keep your customers satisfied by bringing in the right talent, at the right time to deliver projects to standard.

In this article, we’re going to review how a VMS helps you streamline all the decisions, processes and negotiations involved in managing a contingent workforce, to help you work smarter, more effectively and get even better results.

Review and negotiate vendor rates

In a report by Ardent, organisations were found to have an average of 43% of their workforce classed as contingent. Clearly, contingent workers are able to effectively work in a number of unique roles, providing these organisations with a range of skills and expertise.

Managing your relationships with vendors is critical. To do this, you need to have a dashboard that shows you all of your vendor-related information, including:

• Project activity in real time.
• Financial details in real time.
• Supplier metrics (for benchmarking)
• Statements of work (SoWs)

With this information to hand, you will have the insight you need to confidently negotiate with vendors to maximise your relationship.

Analyse and reduce overtime usage

Professionals in procurement and HR are finding it difficult to manage their bill rates outside their VMS, using spreadsheets and other inconvenient methods to calculate their invoices. In other cases, hiring managers may find themselves using a basic calculator tool within a VMS, but with no insight into statutory components and markups, simply trusting the system to calculate costs correctly. With Beeline, clients automatically receive the benefit of using trueRATE, Beeline’s exclusive, pre-configured bill rate calculator to accurately determine bill rates based on the appropriate variables for their program. In this data sheet, you will read how trueRATE can give you negotiating power and flexibility to manage your invoices effectively.

Consolidate budget tracking and compare bill rates to market standards

When businesses don’t exercise complete control over their contingent workforce management programs, they often end up overpaying for their on-demand talent. This of course then affects profit margins. A VMS offers all the analytics and reporting tools that a company could ever need to identify where they might be overpaying or underpaying for temporary workers. Other applications of analysis include examining factors such as the most qualified candidates to employ, job descriptions, and job skills and competencies with hiring success rates in order to craft job descriptions to engage the best possible candidates. In the end, your company will then be able to compare bill rates to market standards and know whether they are paying less or more for the best talent.

Negotiate supplier discounts

As a VMS automates and streamlines every step associated with sourcing, acquiring, managing and paying of temporary workers, it makes it easier to negotiate supplier discounts. Depending on which negotiating style you decide to use, you can include the variable to represent values that are used throughout the negotiation, which may be updated often on a VMS. Beeline’s Services Procurement solution includes scalable functionality to support your project-based initiatives. From sourcing and negotiation to engagement management, invoicing, payment, and evaluation, you will have a centralised view of the entire process.

Track and analyse turnover

Your company’s objectives and goals often change, particularly in industries that experience fluctuating or seasonal demand . This makes it important to curate an organised talent pool that will always be available when needed. A VMS can automate every step of the engagement of non-employee talent, from job requisition through billing and payment to evaluation and reporting. In the process, it ensures that everything is done securely, in accordance with company policy and in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. By storing the data of previous contingent workers, a VMS can help you identify quality candidates at a quick turnaround which reduces the time to hire again and again.

Increase your spend forecast accuracy

Forecasting is a crucial part of any business whether it is sales, revenue or customer demand. Forecasting contingent workforce spend is no exception. With the immediate urgency behind us, the attention has now been turned to creating a go-forward plan. While the goal is preparedness for whatever lies ahead, the future undoubtedly demands a closer examination of labor spend. VMS will help companies build more accurate forecasts because it will increasingly support more tricky forecasting predictions.

The first step on your journey is to ensure whether a VMS is the right fit for your needs. The next step is to develop a well thought-out and communicated plan, and by building a business case. Doing so requires consideration of five elements we call ROGER (Risks, Opportunities, Goals and objectives, Executive buy in and Relevant stakeholders). Gaining a better understanding of your external labor ,spend and how a VMS can generate cost savings, will put you in a better position to address your executives’ ROI concerns confidently.

The importance of choosing Beeline when searching for your extended workforce solution

It’s important to have clear management objectives before you implement your VMS system into your business. By choosing Beeline, your company will receive the VMS benefits you need to support your company’s objectives.

Ready to find out how Beeline can implement the right VMS solution into your company’s contingent workforce management program? Contact us today for more information.