success story
Flexibility and best practices guide post-M&A VMS design
Beeline’s integration and workflow options helped a major Canadian bank merge a subsidiary into a single-instance VMS with consolidated invoicing
- Industry
- Financial Services
- Client Since
- 2016
- Category
- Contingent Staffing, Services Procurement, Resource Tracking
The challenge
Our client is a leading diversified North American financial institution headquartered Canada. In 2017, the company acquired one of the largest US banking institutions. With the acquisition came a large contingent workforce. Our client wanted to incorporate this workforce into the parent company’s contingent workforce management program which uses Beeline’s vendor management system (VMS) as its sourcing and management automation technology.
The client’s contingent workforce management team described what they wanted to accomplish, and Beeline agreed to create a plan and process to implement the desired solution. But that solution required creativity.
The US bank used a different financial software system than its new parent company. It also maintained different contingent workforce data, stored it, manipulated it, and used it differently. It quickly became apparent that Beeline would have to develop innovative solutions to integrate this data to achieve our client’s goal of a single-instance VMS with consolidated invoicing.
Beeline’s in-depth understanding of best practices for integrating contingent workforce data and willingness to accommodate both banks’ needs were the keys to a successful solution.
The solution
Since the acquired company’s contingent workforce data was structured differently than the parent company’s, Beeline could have insisted on creating two separate VMS instances, as many other VMS providers do. But that would not have met our client’s goals.
Or Beeline could have stipulated that the acquired bank reformat its data into the format used by our client, which would have resulted in significant work and disruption for the US bank’s contingent workforce and IT teams.
Instead, Beeline listened carefully to the client’s requirements and conducted a detailed system review to develop an alternate solution. The result was a unique combination of intelligent integration and workflow tools that could satisfy both organizations’ requirements without altering or overwriting existing data.
The results
- Our client has the single-instance VMS solution with consolidated invoicing it needs to manage its contingent workforce program, which was vastly expanded by the addition of the US subsidiary. The consolidation allows for better workforce visibility, budget control, and risk mitigation through legal, regulatory, and policy compliance.
- With many years of experience in designing external workforce management systems, and a strong understanding of data management options and best practices, Beeline was able to meet the client’s needs and provide the tools necessary for them to effectively manage all the talent in their external workforce.