Vendor Management Systems (VMS) are increasingly popular in the contingent workforce space. The right VMS can allow your business to cut costs, more quickly source qualified personnel, plan for total workforce management needs and adjust to increases and decreases in production and demand. Has your company considered exploring the implementation of a VMS? If so, you’ve come to the right place. In this post, the contingent workforce management experts at Monument Consulting cover everything you need to know about VMS solutions.

 

Common Capabilities and Value Adds

An effective VMS, or “Vendor Management System,” is a cloud-based technology solution best known for its ability to streamline the management of contingent workforce. Vendor Management Systems can give companies a leg up by providing a one stop shop for visibility into their full contingent workforce, streamlining processes, increasing compliance, and offering advanced reporting and invoice automation capabilities.

Vendor Management Systems introduce automation to your contingent workforce process, which in return, allows in-house human resources, procurement, and PMO departments to focus on more strategic responsibilities without interruption. Handling external workforce management can be complex, but a VMS can help simplify the process by automating common tasks related to areas such as job posting distribution, vendor management, approvals, candidate qualification, onboarding/offboarding, reporting/analytics, timekeeping, and invoicing.

In addition to automation, a VMS can add value from an audit and compliance perspective. A VMS centralizes your contingent workforce information within a single system, creating accessible audit trails to help ensure you’re meeting all compliance requirements.  Additionally, a VMS can ensure full compliance in regards to legislative and company policies by driving consistency in the process.

With today’s challenging  labor market, finding external talent quickly is crucial for your organization.  Vendor Management Systems can help shorten the time it takes time to fill openings. Hiring managers and vendors will be reminded through the VMS when they have a next step in the hiring process and you will have access to VMS reports that can help you better diagnose which vendors are the most successful in reaching your time to fill KPI’s.

Lastly, a VMS will help control costs by ensuring you are getting contingent labor at a fair price. Rate ranges by role title, location, and experience can be set within the VMS so that you can present your best offer for each opening. Vendors will be subjected to submitting candidates at or below the max rate, helping you to have more controls and better insights on your contingent labor costs.

 

The Benefit of Pairing a VMS with an MSP

The source-to-pay capabilities of a VMS can help your company manage the lifecycle of your contingent workforce. Bringing in a managed services provider (MSP) for complete and daily oversight of the VMS simplifies and enhances processes even further. At Monument Consulting we provide full MSP services with a focus on overall program management, strategic guidance on vendor strategy, enhanced reporting and analytics capabilities of the VMS, and streamlining of the invoice process.

 

 

Notable VMS Companies in the Industry and their Differentiators

  • SAP Fieldglass: SAP Fieldglass was named a leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites. SAP’s VMS solution and implementation offers process automation compliance technology, including a single-entry point for all of your locations and business units to avoid any inaccurate or disjointed results; complete supplier partner integration; analytics capabilities; and automated on-boarding processes. They pride themselves on transparency, their ability to work with third parties, and the ability of their various resources to save their corporate partners’ money, particularly on recruiting and training costs.
  • Beeline: Beeline’s Extended Workforce Platform (EWP) is focused on providing a solution for workforce agility. They fill staffing needs for corporate clients who are high volume with shift-based workforces. Beeline’s EWP seeks to leverage clients’ brand equity to recruit talent, looking always to find the best prices. They claim decades of VMS success, and growing rates of automation for seamless tracking of all non-employee personnel.
  • VNDLY: VNDLY represents its VMS platform as “modern, intuitive, and friendly.” It touts agile software with frequent new releases, built-in API integrations, and “effortless” migration from legacy platforms. This might be a good fit for a corporation that is concerned with keeping existing data while modernizing its platforms. VNDLY wants implementation and launch to be as easy as possible for its clients, and strives to provide an intuitive and configurable interface. In December of 2021, it was announced that Workday had officially acquired VNDLY in a move that will undoubtedly have impacts on the industry for years to come.
  • Coupa CCW: Coupa’s goal is to help companies spend less on services, and gain visibility and control during the process. Their VMS aims to provide advanced capabilities to help their corporate clients source and manage workers at scale. They provide onboarding services, processes to reduce compliance risk and improve performance and overall value within your contingent workforce. Among their VMS platforms most important capabilities are staff augmentation optimization, worker tracking acceleration, onboarding compliance automation, and reporting customization.
  • 3Story: 3Story supports an extended end-to-end workflow (from procurement through offboarding). The 3Story VMS allows you to track, automate, and process contingent labor with capabilities that can be catered to your organization. 3Story includes a reporting suit that, amongst other areas, allow you to track costs and performance.

Where the VMS Industry is Headed

As with all industries, we’re prepared to see the VMS space incorporate even more machine-learning capabilities and expansions into features incorporating artificial intelligence technology. Integrated solutions are on the rise, as are compatibility with clients’ HR and procurement departments. Additionally, there’s an increasing focus on the candidate/worker experience ensuring it is easy and intuitive to work with a company through their VMS platform.  One thing is for sure: for long term agility and scalability, the effectiveness of partnering with a contingent workforce management provider is here to stay.

Partnering with Monument Consulting

Founded in 2003, Monument Consulting is built on a commitment to our clients and our shared values. Through our genuine passion for delivery, relentless pursuit of perfection, and bold decision making, we are creating a more agile contingent workforce so businesses can dream bigger and achieve more. Our model is vendor neutral, and we partner with industry-leading VMS systems to bring our corporate clients the best outcomes. If you’re looking for a partner who’s ready to help, contact us.