There are various reasons an organization leverages a contingent workforce to help meet its needs. In today’s business climate, organizations are increasingly reliant on contingent workers to tackle big projects, meet tight deadlines, backfill resignations, or temporarily scale their in-house staff. If you are making the investment, how do you ensure you are receiving value?

According to an SAP Fieldglass report: Contingent Workforce Insights 2019: Expertise in Full Force​, “62 percent of executives say that the contingent workforce is important or extremely important to meeting business needs for specialized new IT and digital skills.” Yet, many decision makers invest millions of dollars in sometimes multiple suppliers and struggle with answering critical business questions such as:

• Are we being overbilled for time not actually worked?
• Are we sourcing the right suppliers for the business?
• Are there any compliance risks that should be addressed?
• Are we capturing the right data to understand performance by supplier?

What if I said you can stop guessing and start knowing these answers? What if I could hellp you to embrace a safe space where you can alleviate the common pain points draining you financially, taking projects off track, stifling your managers, and leaving you as an executive blind to which supplier is really helping to move the needle for your business. Fortunately, this is possible by leveraging leading-edge technologies that function within your existing eco-system to gain full transparency of how your workforce spends its time leading to more informed business decisions.

The Impact of not Optimizing Your contingent Workforce

Let’s just ensure we are all on the same page. We are defining contingent workforce as temporary, or contract labor sourced to augment staff for short-term or seasonal needs or to fill skill gaps. These are professional individuals fulfilling most of their day through technology—often referred to as knowledge workers. We are excluding your permanent, full-time employees. Let’s save that for another article.

So, why now? Why is it important now to optimize how you manage your outsourced labor? Today’s new business norms add a layer of complexities and challenges within your operations you can’t afford to ignore. The impact of contingent workers can be wide and deep across your enterprise. Potential issues you may experience in your current program could include:

Over Billing

Conceptually, a contingent workforce can be a shrewd cost-saving maneuver that can free up resources and plug in skill gaps to accelerate objectives and outcomes. Most companies assume their contingent workers are actually working and their supplier is actively monitoring and correcting inconsistent work patterns. The reality is neither is occurring leaving you wide open to overbilling by your supplier. With labor costs on the rise, vigilance over your supplier’s business practices is increasingly important.

Inconsistent Work Quality

Are your contingent workers consistently meeting or exceeding designated key performance indicators? Is your team even tracking contingent workforce performance?

A lack of KPIs can put a strain on your enterprise workforce and contingent workforce. The inability to identify the suppliers providing the most productive talent puts key projects at risk.

Business Risk Vulnerability

Business risks are heightened when you are in the dark about who is accessing protected applications or files. To prevent such risks, it is necessary to be vigilant of authorizations and proper access to files and company tools.

Without the proper controls in place to protect the business, some companies experience long-term affects to revenue, reputation, regulatory compliance, or overall erosion to employee and customer trust.

The Golden Opportunity to Optimize Your Contingent Workforce

If no one’s guarding the hen house, the fox is going to show up. The current sourcing and purchasing tools and systems, combined with existing processes and partners are ineffective in providing a cost-effective source to pay process. The Golden Opportunity, rarely capitalized upon, is linked to determining the value for your money. Your ability to add this dimension, will help you further optimize your contingent workforce investment.

No longer operate in the dark with the right data points visible to business leaders to know whether your suppliers are simply billing you based on your contract or based on true work performed. Sapience Analytics’ data, analytics, insights, and decision support platform will enable you achieve the best value from your suppliers. Companies start to experience real benefits such as:

Immediate Cost Benefits

Now you have productivity data that serves as the source of truth for T&M billed. Simplified reporting helps decision makers identify discrepancies that may lead to rebates.

With advanced data analysis capabilities, all your data becomes actionable insights that will fuel growth, enhance organizational competitiveness, and optimize staff productivity.

Data-Driven Supplier Management

Easily define and track KPIs that are most relevant to the needs of your organization. With this insight, you can improve vendor selection, by vendor and skill level. You will have the freedom to customize your reporting dashboard, allowing you to detect trends more effectively within your vendors. You can leverage this information to proactively eliminate, utilize, standardize, centralize, or renegotiate your supplier list to optimize your workforce that works best for your business.

Strengthen Compliance

By streamlining data collection, analysis, and reporting, a modern organizational performance and insights platform will also allow you to identify and address compliance gaps. Make sure the right stakeholders know who has access to what applications and when.

Negotiation Leverage

We are all about structured data that leads to meaningful actions for those who manage suppliers. With the power of big data at your fingertips, decision makers can make confident decisions around vendors to keep, pricing parameters, reallocation of work, incentives for higher productivity, and more. With this insight, you can ensure that you are making the right choices to further the goals of your organization, increase productivity, and put your staff in the prime position to succeed.

Vue How Your Contingent Workforce Really Works with Sapience Vue

Optimizing your contingent workforce is attainable with Sapience Contingent Workforce Vue. Our enabling technology blends resource-level work patterns with vendor rate data offering an untapped perspective around the value of your contingent workforce.

Want to learn more about Sapience Vue? We invite you to schedule a no-obligation demonstration. Unlock your company’s full potential of maximum productivity with Sapience Vue today!