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Companies that rely on a contingent workforce benefit from partnering with managed staffing service providers (MSPs). At the same time, integrating vendor management system (VMS) with your MSP also provides significant advantages. This paired approach makes the contingent workforce management process easier and more effective. It also facilitates data-driven decision making, especially when using VMS platforms with strong reporting functionality.
Additionally, partnering with an MSP specializing in contingent workforce management lets your managers focus more on internal operations. Trust that your talent needs are handled by industry experts that understand your company’s business and ideal candidate profile. Vendor management systems also play a key role in fostering efficiency.
Let’s examine the concept of vendor management systems and their role in effective contingent workforce management. Use these insights to adopt a more effective management approach for your temporary talent. Understanding the relationship between the VMS and the MSP helps businesses make an informed decision on this staffing strategy.
Introduction to Vendor Management Systems
Simply stated, a VMS is an application used to manage most aspects of a contingent workforce. This includes everything from sourcing and recruiting to onboarding and other HR duties. Modern VMS tools leverage AI and automation to foster higher levels of efficiency. They especially become critical for businesses with a large number of temporary workers.
A typical VMS tool manages talent requisition, timesheets, expenses, and more. This functionality reduces the burden on your business’s HR team, allowing them to focus more on internal employees. This benefit parallels that of your managers being able to concentrate on company operations instead of conducting staffing efforts.
A VMS effectively serves as a single source of truth, keeping information about your contingent workforce on one platform. As a result, it facilitates regulatory compliance and even helps with any occasional audits. The best VMS applications also include strong reporting and analytics functionality, ensuring an effective contingent workforce management process.
The Role of Managed Service Providers
Businesses regularly benefit from managed services providers for a wide array of business functions. Many MSPs support technology functions as evidenced by SaaS, IaaS, and similar Cloud-based service offerings. Notably, managed staffing service providers offer significant benefits to companies with a large number of temporary workers.
Top-shelf staffing MSPs boast a diverse collection of talent vendors, supporting a large candidate pool filled with qualified professionals. As a result, expect to quickly close any skills gaps or scale your team to meet high-demand workloads. You gain this scalability at a fraction of the cost compared to managing these needs with your HR team.
Managed staffing services also handle your regulatory and tax compliance issues. This capability becomes especially beneficial for companies with locations in multiple states or even countries. Once again, managing these issues internally ultimately overburdens your internal staff.
Integration of Vendor Management Systems with Managed Service Providers
The best staffing MSPs leverage vendor management systems for a variety of process improvements. They seamlessly integrate their VMS application as part of the overall service offerings they provide to clients. It plays a key role in delivering exceptional talent acquisition services to companies with large temporary workforces.
Effective contingent workforce management becomes easier when using a VMS tool as part of the process. As noted earlier, it provides a single source of data offering meaningful visibility to all aspects of a temporary workforce. If your company wants to truly leverage the benefits of its staffing MSP, ensure they use a VMS tool!
Benefits of Using MSPs for Implementing Vendor Management Systems
Let’s examine some of the most important benefits of using an MSP with a vendor management system. Use these insights to differentiate between different MSP partners before choosing the right one for your business.
For example, a VMS makes rate management easier, especially when using a variety of talent vendors. As a result, you gain a measure of predictability with your staffing expenses, helping your budgeting process. Additionally, vendor payments become more accurate as a result.
A VMS application also improves the onboarding process for new temporary workers. It also makes other aspects of your contingent talent workflow more efficient, especially communication. Note that the top VMS tools seamlessly integrate with accounting, HR, and corporate financial applications.
Cost Control Through Vendor Management Systems
Having a centralized workflow optimized by a VMS improves the cost effectiveness of any contingent workforce management strategy. Here are a few ways partnering with an MSP using a VMS helps save money on your staffing expenses. These are other points worth exploring with potential staffing MSP partners.
Reducing Administrative Costs
Improving the process efficiency of your contingent workforce management ultimately helps save money. The internal HR team is free from managing your temporary workers, reducing their workload and lowering your administrative costs. Other cost savings are gained through everything from consolidated billing to reducing the risk of hiring mistakes.
Improved Spend Visibility
We already talked about how a vendor management system serves as a single source of truth for your temporary workforce. This data in a platform with strong reporting and data analytics functionality provides significant visibility into your staffing spend. Once again, this system greatly boosts your business’s strategic planning and staffing budgeting capabilities.
Budget Management with Vendor Management Systems
Speaking of budgetary management, this remains one of biggest benefits gained by using a vendor management system. The reporting and analytics capabilities mentioned earlier make forecasting and planning a breeze, while providing real-time budget tracking. Also leverage any advice from your staffing MSP for additional insights on budget management.
Of course, compliance and risk management remain important for companies with temporary workers, especially in multiple states. Managing compliance with payroll and tax regulations becomes difficult without an experienced partner. Working with a managed staffing provider without a VMS simply reduces the benefits of this partnership.
Enhancing Contingent Workforce Management
Now, let’s explore some of the ways a VMS makes the contingent workforce management strategy more effective. Leverage these insights for more reasons why partnering with an MSP using a VMS makes perfect sense.
Streamlined Workforce Management
A vendor management system offers businesses with temporary workers a streamlined approach for workforce management. The enhanced reporting and visibility mentioned earlier makes managing workers easier and more effective. Additionally, a VMS’s rate management capabilities combined with simplified integration with existing corporate applications also helps.
Quality Assurance and Performance Monitoring
Tracking the performance of each contingent worker including their overall quality remains easy when using a centralized VMS tool. It also provides meaningful insights on efficiency throughout your business, tracking where each temp makes a positive impact. By using a VMS and its data, you quickly derive analyses on efficient processes and what needs improvement.
Flexibility and Scalability
Obviously, businesses with a large contingent workforce leverage this strategy to stay nimble as an organization. Partnering with a staffing MSP with a top-shelf VMS tool helps you achieve even higher levels of flexibility and scalability. You quickly see at a glance where you need to scale your talent level. An exceptional VMS tool ultimately fosters the data-driven decision making that helps companies reach higher levels of success.
Data-Driven Decision Making with Vendor Management Systems
It comes as no surprise that a VMS platform with strong reporting and data analytics functionality facilitates data-driven decision making. In fact, some of the leading vendor management systems even leverage analysis powered by AI and machine learning. Once again, ask some pointed questions about their VMS tool when meeting with potential staffing MSP partners.
Leveraging Analytics and Reporting
We regularly mention the fact that a VMS serves as a single source of truth for your contingent workforce. Having all this hard data, including meaningful analytical insights, informs your business’s decision-making process. A strong analytics and reporting tool remains essential for getting the most benefit from any vendor management system.
Identifying Cost-Saving Opportunities
The reporting engine of any top-shelf, modern VMS application helps your business and MSP partner find other cost-saving opportunities. We previously noted the significant visibility offered by a VMS application with superior reporting and data analytics features. One of the main benefits gained by this visibility involves finding bottlenecks in your company’s operational workflows. Leverage this capability to optimize the efficiency of your entire operations, saving money and improving profitability as a result.
Strategic Vendor Relationships
Finally, having data-derived, actionable VMS insights helps you build and support relationships with your company’s talent vendors. This is the case whether working with the vendor directly or through your staffing MSP. It definitely helps when building a contingent talent network providing your company with the flexibility it needs for success. Strong vendor relationships let you forge a diverse workforce fostering productive operations and a successful business!
Leverage Vendor Management Systems with Anserteam Today!
If your company wants to partner with a managed staffing service provider that fully understands the importance of a top-shelf VMS, connect with Anserteam. As one of the top contingent workforce management organizations in the country, let us help improve your efficiency and profitability. Schedule a meeting with us to discuss your contingent talent acquisition needs.
