Everything you need to know on how a VMS will help you to better manage your staffing agencies and evaluate their performance
Today, outsourcing is increasingly used by companies as a way to save money and access specialized expertise.
This is particularly true when it comes to the contingent workforce, where staffing agencies can help businesses engage contingent workers. These contingent workers offer businesses benefits such as access to hot skills, seamless scalability, reduced costs and a huge number of other advantages.
Yet to realize the true potential of these vendors, successful vendor management is crucial.
Here's everything you need to know to successfully manage your staffing agencies with your Vendor Management System; and build a successful contingent workforce management program.
Formal vendor management, however, has largely been a business practice for large enterprises with vast amounts of spend - allowing them to invest in expensive technology and dedicated procurement departments.
That’s not to say that smaller organizations don’t have vendors. They do. They just historically haven’t had access to the technologies that allow them to truly, and strategically, manage them. Thankfully, this has now changed. With a number of new technological solutions on the market to manage those vendors, smaller businesses are now discovering that they have the capabilities to implement more strategic vendor management practices.
Are you struggling with the complexities of managing your external workforce and the vendors associated with it?
In this guide you’ll discover some proven best practices and solutions designed specifically for getting better results from the vendors within your non-employee workforce program, simply by improving how you manage those vendors.
This page will help you to better understand the importance of managing the vendors used within your contingent workforce program, and how technology and best practices can result in a huge return on investment (ROI).
Learning how to manage vendors starts with understanding exactly what vendor management is, and how it applies in the context of your business’s goals.
Vendor management is a process that organizations strategically build to manage their vendors - also known as suppliers. Vendor management includes everything from sourcing vendors, negotiating contracts, controls and compliance, cost management, mitigating risk and analyzing vendor performance to ensure service delivery.
Through successful vendor management, organizations are able to meet their business objectives, control costs, minimize potential business disruption and ensure they are able to deliver on their own customer expectations.
Here’s how Gartner describes vendor management:
“Vendor management is a discipline that enables organizations to control costs, drive service excellence and mitigate risks to gain increased value from their vendors throughout the deal life cycle.”
Vendor management refers to a strategic process that involves managing suppliers from a range of industries, whether it be your company’s marketing consultants, IT vendors or software suppliers.
This guide, however, will be specifically looking at how vendor management applies to your organization’s non-employee workforce.
With around 40 percent of the US workforce currently made up of contingent workers (independent contractors and temporary workers) and the average organization having 18 percent of their workforce hired on a contingent basis, vendors are becoming an increasingly important success factor for any business that’s leveraging non-employee workers.
Staffing agencies, also known as staffing vendors or staffing firms, are used by organizations to ensure they are able to meet real-time workforce requirements.
A staffing vendor will work on behalf of a business, matching temporary job candidates with relevant positions within the organization. This helps to ensure that companies are able to scale up and down rapidly depending on current business requirements, as well as access hot skills within their industry.
Yet just using a staffing agency doesn’t guarantee a ROI. That’s where vendor management comes in.
When it comes to a company’s non-employee workforce, successful vendor management is important for a number of reasons.
Vendor management plays a key role in selecting the right vendors that lead to program success. Vendor management is a crucial step in achieving your workforce requirements, and, ultimately, your business goals.
Through an effective vendor management approach that puts centralization and insightful data at the forefront of business decisions, your organization will be able to effectively manage vendors to improve workforce quality and reduce costs.
The result? Your business will be perfectly prepared for long-term growth in a cost-effective manner.
Vendor management benefits:
Managing vendors involves a large amount of data and analytics. On top of that, it’s likely that you are using a number of staffing agencies to source non-employee workers - making vendor management even more complex.
To make this even worse, organizations are still using manual management processes such as spreadsheets, in-house databases or sharepoint-like websites.
Performing these manual processes lead to a number of vendor management challenges, which all result in poor decision making, hidden costs and a complete lack of visibility into your non-employee workforce program.
Here are just a few of the top vendor management challenges that organizations face:
Lack of visibility: When managing vendors, it’s crucial your entire company is singing from the same hymn sheet. With manual processes, it’s almost impossible to prevent department leaders from engaging staffing agencies on their own terms, hiring non-employees at a rate they think is acceptable and not the company-set rates.
Vendor compliance risk: Setting standards for your vendors is a crucial component of making sure they are helping your company to achieve its objectives. If you aren’t managing your vendors correctly and recording data properly, there’s no way of knowing whether your staffing agencies are meeting your company’s standards or adhering to their agreements and local statutory laws.
Vendor data storage: To place temps and independent contractors across your organization, it’s likely you are dealing with multiple vendors, hiring for multiple projects and multiple team leaders are hiring these workers. To avoid fragmented processes, it’s crucial that vendor data is consolidated into one centralized location and updated in real-time for your entire organization to see.
To address the above challenges, businesses have to move away from manual spreadsheets. Instead, they should use vendor management software.
Your business is relying on vendors to source, engage and place the non-employee workers into your organization that will drive business growth and meet your current workforce requirements.
To ensure they achieve what is expected, it’s important that you build a vendor management process that puts data and visibility at the forefront of your strategy. That’s where a vendor management system comes in.
A vendor management system is a web or cloud-based platform that allows businesses to manage their entire vendor process in one centralized, and automated, location. By consolidating vendors into one place that can be accessed across the entire organization, businesses are able to effectively track, measure and manage vendor performance.
Here’s a comment from Deloitte, on why monitoring vendor performance is crucial:
“Monitoring of vendor services is important to be able to see, communicate and escalate vendor-related issues at an early stage. This requires measurement instruments to reliably and continuously measure and compare performance against benchmarks and between vendors. The challenge is to define and select the right indicators to measure service quality across multiple providers and to have a uniform and consistent view. Vendor monitoring is important because it is the key to continuous service improvement.”
Here are the top five ways a VMS will benefit your vendor management process:
Better workforce visibility - By managing your vendors in one centralized location, you’ll significantly improve visibility into vendor performance and the current state of your non-employee workforce program. You’ll have insight into how much you are spending, and where improvements can be made.
Now you have a VMS and the processes in place to successfully manage your vendors, it’s time to use the data you collect to create some KPIs.
These are the top metrics every organization should track to optimize agency performance in a contingent workforce program.
These metrics will help ensure that the vendors you work with are delivering continued ROI within your contingent workforce program.
1. Time to Fill (TTF)
2. Quality of Hire
3. Submittal-to-Hire Ratio
4. Bill Rate Compliance
5. Worker Turnover Rate
6. Worker Satisfaction
7. Fill Rate
8. Compliance Adherence
Using Metrics to Drive Better Agency Performance
Metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your staffing agency partnerships. To maximize their impact:
By tracking and acting on these metrics, you’ll not only enhance agency performance but also achieve greater efficiency, quality, and satisfaction within your contingent workforce program.
Contact Conexis VMS today. Our team of experts would love to discuss how our vendor management system is the perfect solution for your vendor management needs.
Conexis VMS is the very first vendor management system designed to automate and consolidate the entire non-employee workforce and staffing agency management process.
Conexis VMS is the world's easiest vendor management system. Built on the latest technology, our system has been built with the user in mind to ensure a seamless user experience that improves your return on investment. Conexis VMS has been specifically designed without the complicated bells and whistles of the traditional VMS players. We are easy to implement, seamless to use and improve ROI!
No matter the size of your temporary workforce, Conexis VMS will help you manage it with our award-winning VMS.
➡️ 5 Reasons to Use Staffing Agencies: & How to Manage Them Effectively with a VMS
➡️ VMS: The Simplest Way to Manage Your Staffing Agencies
➡️ Managing Staffing Agencies: To Tender or Not to Tender
➡️ Managing Staffing Agencies: Your Guide to Performance Management & KPIs
➡️ Staffing Agency Bill Rate: What is it?
➡️ Best Practices: Managing Staffing Agencies for your Contingent Workforce
➡️ Managing Staffing Agencies: What Bells & Whistles do you Really Need?
➡️ Using VMS Software to Track Staffing Agency Performance
➡️ 5 Dangers of using Manual Spreadsheets to Manage Staffing Vendors
➡️ How to Choose a Staffing Agency for You Company's Contingent Workforce Needs
➡️ VMS Technology: Why Manual Spreadsheets are Not Effective
Conexis VMS has helped put our contractors in one consolidated place - giving us visibility and control over our temporary workers, enabling us to have more predictability and oversight of our costs.
Global Final Mile Delivery Company
VP People & Culture
We had all the traditional contingent workforce issues that large enterprise companies have, however, we struggled to find a VMS provider that could give us a technology solution within our budget and we felt could attend to our needs properly. Conexis has been a godsend since we implemented it 5 years ago. We now have full visibility to our entire workforce and access to all of our data.
Global MSP Provider
SR VP of Delivery
We had all the traditional contingent workforce issues that most companies have, however, we struggled to find a VMS provider that could give us a technology solution within our budget and could attend to our needs properly. Conexis has been a godsend since we implemented it over 5 years ago. We now have full visibility of our entire workforce and access to all of our data.
North American Pharmaceutical Company
Director of Procurement
We have been using Conexis for three years now, I think we were one of their first customers. When we started with Conexis we were looking to run an RFP, but after a meeting and demo, we knew Conexis was the perfect fit for our organization. It had the functionality we needed, and their client-centric culture was an important deciding factor. They didn’t let us down.
Global Pharmaceutical Company
HR Director
Even though we are a global organization, we had no way of knowing where and how many contractors we had in our organization. Conexis has put all of our contractors in one place giving us full visibility to our global roster of temps. This has allowed us to standardize our costs, manage compliance and drive better performance of our staffing agencies. The system is simple, easy to use, and implementation was quick and painless.
Global Consumer Products Company
Regional Procurement Manager
We were struggling to manage one of our larger professional services clients due to the client's own VMS inefficiencies. We implemented Conexis internally to manage the entire MSP workflow from request to agency payments.
North American MSP
Senior Program Manager
Their customer care is amazing and their infrastructure allowed us to white label the platform. If we need custom changes we don’t wait months like some of the other VMS partners we have. Often changes and upgrades are done in a few weeks at the most. We are now rolling Conexis out in Europe.
Global MSP
North American Director
I have used a lot of VMS systems over the last ten years and I can honestly say that Conexis is the easiest and simplest to use VMS of all of them. Please don’t change!
US Managed Service Provider
Senior Account Manager
Conexis was able to get us up and running so fast and at no cost. We have a lot of unique requirements but that didn’t impact the timeline or the budget. Just a great experience all around.
Global Beauty Products Company
Senior Procurement Manager
We looked at many VMS providers, but the cost was crazy. We had given up until we came across Conexis. They set us up and had us running in a few weeks. The license fees are very reasonable as well.
Global Pharmaceutical Manufacturer
Procurement Directors
Our powerful, yet easy to use vendor management system has been built on the latest technology and designed with the user in mind. Making it the perfect solution for any sized business looking to get control of their entire contingent workforce and the suppliers that provide them.