Managing a contingent workforce is not only highly complex, it’s also incredibly time consuming for your team. You have to source vendors, do background checks on contingent workers, onboard workers, fill in time cards, send invoices and so much more.
Your contingent workforce program is a huge amount of work, and manually managing these processes often leads to human error and mistakes that dramatically impact the visibility your business has into program performance.
Thankfully, there’s a solution. VMS automation allows you to automate these time-consuming processes and record more accurate contingent workforce management data that gives you the insight you need to improve program performance.
In this blog, we’re going to talk about what VMS automation is and how it can benefit your organization.
Firstly, what is a VMS?
A VMS, known more formally as a vendor management system, is an internet-enabled platform that allows organizations to manage and procure staffing agencies, as well as contingent workers.
The use of a vendor management system to properly optimize how businesses manage these workers (and the staffing agencies used to source them) will ensure companies have complete visibility and control over workforce spend and quality in one centralized location.
A VMS empowers your organization to dramatically improve contingent workforce management through better monitoring and tracking of vendor performance, the ability to gain complete visibility of your workforce, ensure contingent workforce compliance and consolidate all data associated with your program into one centralized location.
What does VMS automation include?
Not only that, but a vendor management system automates the end-to-end processes of managing contingent workers and staffing agencies. That includes everything from sourcing, onboarding and measuring staffing agency performance, time entry and approval, invoicing and so much more.
Here are some of the top contingent workforce management processes that can be improved through VMS automation:
✔️ Requesting, screening and selecting contingent workers
Through the use of a VMS, your team can easily create, approve and post requisitions to staffing agencies, as well as automate the process of screening and accepting candidates, and signing staffing agency contracts.
✔️ Workforce onboarding and offboarding
Through VMS automation your business can easily perform onboarding steps such as background checks, training, provisioning, (physical and technology access. In addition, you can also automate all offboarding processes when a contingent workers’ contract ends.
✔️ Contingent workforce program performance KPIs
A vendor management system will store staffing agency data and keep track of important metrics. Standard and custom reporting functionalities will give your business and insight into the performance of your program, with KPIs like time-to-fill, program spend and turnover.
✔️ Time cards and expenses
A VMS automates the time cards and expense process by allowing contingent workers to log into a portal where they can enter their time cards and expenses. Hiring managers can then either accept or reject these entries.
✔️ Invoicing and payment
A vendor management system will automatically run invoicing on approved time and expense submissions, saving your team countless hours of manually entering this information.
How your your business will benefit from VMS automation
Whether your HR or procurement team takes ownership of managing your company’s contingent workforce, it’s unlikely you have a dedicated team for managing the contingent category. That means the contingent workforce is probably taking away a lot of hours from that team’s core competencies.
Through VMS automation, you can save your team time so that they can focus on the initiatives that drive real value and profit growth for your business.
VMS automation saves money in a range of different ways for your organization. Firstly, it takes away repetitive boring tasks from workers so they can focus on more important tasks that drive real value. This improves the ROI your team offers.
Secondly, It can also help you redirect your wages to areas of your business that could have a larger impact on your overall revenue.
When it comes to contingent workforce management, there are a few things you need to consider when it comes to compliance. The main two are staffing agency risk and contingent worker compliance. To ensure your program has solid ROI and you’re not running into legal issues with your contingent workers, it’s important to have standardized processes in place.
VMS automation ensures that all hiring managers follow company rules and standardized processes, as opposed to going rogue and sourcing staffing agencies and contingent workers on their own terms and at their own rates.
When you use a VMS to automate contingent workforce processes, all of your data is saved in the same way in one centralized platform. This helps prevent hiring managers from storing data across emails and spreadsheets, which eventually gets lost.
The result? Your business will now gain visibility into its contingent workforce, giving you insightful metrics and KPIs into the performance of your program that allow for future improvements.
When contingent workforce data is stored on various technologies and different spreadsheets, it becomes incredibly time-consuming and laborious to complete processes and ensure they are done correctly. In fact, it’s almost impossible. People spend time navigating apps, switching between technologies, learning the correct processes and making mistakes.
Handing off these repetitive tasks to a vendor management system will dramatically enhance the overall productivity of your team.
Interested in learning more about VMS automation? Get in touch with Contrax Workforce today. Let’s discuss how implementing a vendor management system into your company’s contingent workforce program can come with great benefits.
