As featured in HRMOutlook Magazine

The contingent workforce grew exponentially during the pandemic, and Bradley Killinger, CEO of Sapience Analytics, cites future trends when describing the potential for the outsourcing marketplace to continue to grow. It is expected that external labor will make up to 35 percent or more of the entire workforce by as early as 2025. Given this trend, ensuring a company is getting what they pay for is only going to become more important.

To this point, most companies want to hire on the best skill they can, and oftentimes that means looking outside their organization to freelancers, contract workers, and part-time employees. This creates an “interesting black box,” says Sue Watts, President of Sapience Analytics. “In the almost 30 years I’ve been working, there’s never been a way to validate actual work time versus supplier hours submitted through a VMS. It is a “trust me” ecosystem and is one of the big issues in the traditional external labor procure to pay process,” Sue explains.

Trust but Verify with Sapience

Overbilling happens because of the unknown gap between actual work time and self-reported data. “Most companies are lacking a tool that can provide visibility or an understanding of what’s happening in terms of that external labor. It’s being left to managers, void of reliable information, to decide if those services provided met their promised value,” Sue says. The lack of visibility makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible for managers to:

1. Accurately and reliably verify time actually worked
2. Identify any gap between self-reported time and actual worktime before invoicing
3. Minimize errors that can lead to overpayment

Consequently, managers are relegated to trust the hours the supplier self-reports on the weekly timecards.

Trying to close these gaps in visibility and transparency is Sapience, a one-of-a-kind SaaS Platform that is transforming how companies get more value from their contingent workforce.

The company, founded in 2009, evolved into an intelligent and scalable workforce analytics platform capable of seamless integration. The platform, fueled by automated activity collection and advanced analytics, extracts work effort data anytime, anywhere, producing insights into behaviors and results. This type of visibility not only drives transparency, but also leads to better decision-making aimed at increasing the value businesses receive from the contingent workforce.

“We’ve developed a 100% automated platform that silently runs in the background of the enterprise without collecting any personal information. Basically, our platform is designed to tell a story of someone’s typical workday, when it started, ended and everything in between. It’s 100% automated,” Killinger explains.

Moreover, the increased visibility is driving a more effective way of understanding if a company has the right workers with the right skills. Companies that run Sapience are becoming better at realizing if they’re utilizing their workforce to its optimal efficiency.

Sapience transparanSEE, the aptly titled solution that provides contingent workforce analytics, is known to reduce a company’s external labor spend by 30% or more. It’s hard to imagine that the contingent workforce could be so costly, given its goal to access the right talent while saving on costs. “What Sapience is uncovering in the current ecosystem is that the buyer is being taken advantage of because it’s hard to verify the self-reported timecard of each individual worker.

How Customers Save Millions with Workforce Analytics

“It’s really just harvesting that company’s own data and translating it into very interesting actionable insights to manage the business. It’s an automated way to guide external labor capacity to an optimal state, while simultaneously leveraging the data long- term to manage contingent workers for better outcomes,” Killinger says.

Our solution is helping companies challenge the one-sided practices allowing suppliers to use self-reported time as the basis for external labor invoices. With Sapience transparenSEE, our platform used to manage the contingent workforce, leaders have visibility to workforce insights that impact the bottom line by:

• Leveling the playing field for the buyer and suppliers with automated work data.
• Enabling managers to accurately and reliably approve timecards efficiently.
• Minimizing errors with a Three-Way Match Gap aligning the purchase order, goods receipt, and the supplier’s invoice
• Identifying 30% or more reduction in existing external labor spend

Companies utilizing the power of Sapience are reaping the benefits of increased visibility and transparency. For example, a leading bank in the US deployed Sapience’s platform and quickly saved $6.8 million in external labor costs.

The management team needed visibility to reduce costs, increase accountability, and make more strategic staffing decisions. Sapience was able to provide them with insight into the workday, the number of hours worked, and the time spent working on core tasks versus meetings attended and communication. This led the company to evaluate these measures and make strategic decisions to optimize how their workforce was operating.

The underlying theme of transformation revolves around the type of mentality and culture of acceptance in which we find ourselves. Because of pressures and goals managers juggle in their day to day, it is easy to settle into a routine that checks the boxes when approving timecards but misses the mark to objectively measure adequate project and goal attainment while managing spend. “The reality is inefficiency of that process is costing most companies 30 to 50% of what they need to spend. Sapience is helping to show those inequities and inefficiencies,” Sue says.

As a leader within an organization, you understand the dynamics of the contingent workforce and the importance placed on the capacity and efficiency of this type of workforce. The possibilities of what can be achieved are numerous and in large part rest on visibility that the managers have to the actual work being done. To this point, Sue explains how managers are making accept or reject decisions that have material cost implications to the business. Moreover, the managers are handicapped with limited information about the possibilities that exist in the workforce with respect to how it’s being utilized. “Companies are stuck in a world where an individual manager down in the organization is defining what good looks like, and you as a company is overpaying for that,” she says.

Sapience sees the future of managing contingent workforce spend on a level playing field for the buyer and suppliers. Sapience is removing blinders and enabling managers to challenge the status quo of self- reported time. This dated process has been replaced with automation that instills accuracy, consistency, and efficiency across the people, processes and technology. Companies can now drive their own growth and impact by overcoming the core challenges and leveraging opportunities that the workforce presents. For those companies seeking opportunities to optimize your external labor capacity and save millions, contact Sapience Analytics today.