How to gain visibility | Cost and output of your workforce

Finding Information about the location, cost and output of your contractor population can be very difficult to gather. In fact, based on our 35+ years’ experience in contractor workforce management, we rarely see clients that can easily access this data, unless they already have a Vendor Management System (VMS) in place that has been properly configured for contractor management.

So how could a contingent workforce solution help your business secure greater visibility on your contractor workforce?

1. Integration of innovative technology 

To begin with, a Managed Service Programme (MSP) can get you easier and quicker access to data through market-leading technology.

Most Vendor Management Systems (VMS) offer easily digestible dashboards and in-depth reporting on the location and cost of contractors as standard, but leading technologies are growing into innovative areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

There are also a range of ‘plug-in’ technologies available in most platforms to cover areas outside of vacancy management, including chatbot/contractor experience, assessment & screening, interview scheduling, recruitment marketing, candidate rediscovery & ranking and diversity & inclusion.

Some MSP providers will offer pre-selected or proprietary technology, but true MSP partners will work with you to select the technology platform that best suits yours needs and budget. 

2. More reliable data through process re-engineering

Secondly, being able to access data quickly is meaningless if the data itself is not reliable. A Managed Service Programme partner can help you review and redesign your flexible workforce management processes to ensure consistency, quality and accuracy across all of your company’s different business units and locations. 

More often than not, poor processes are at the heart of issues with accurate data capture. Badly-designed processes can mean that contractors onboarded in London, for example, follow a completely different process to those in Manchester; resulting in the wrong information being captured and the quality of your data being distorted.

Effective processes ensure that contractor data is captured and stored consistently, so you will never be in the dark about the cost, location and output of your contractor workforce. Not only that, but you will also benefit from efficiencies; saving time and improving the experience for all involved.

3. Insights to enable better workforce utilisation and planning

Finally, beyond just accessing data about your contractor workforce, a Managed Service Programme (MSP) partner can help you harness that information to make better business decisions. An MSP partner offering an advanced flexible workforce solution will work with your business as part of a ‘total talent committee’ to understand when and where resource will be required to deliver your objectives; whether that’s through the contractor workforce, permanent talent or even outsourced ‘statement of work’ services. 

By bringing your workforce solutions provider(s) into the heart of your pipelining activities, they will be able to proactively prepare pools of resource who could be brought in quickly to help you deliver your business-critical projects.

They will also be able to provide insights into workforce utilisation; flexibly moving contractors around your business as assignments close out to reduce sourcing costs. 

The ability to easily access information about your flexible workforce is important so your business has visibility on what, where and why it is spending money on contractors. However, the real value is in what can happen after you gain better access to this data.

Your flexible workforce partner can help you harness this information to make better business decisions and create a competitive differentiator through your approach to workforce management.

Are you interested in finding out about how an Contingent Workforce Solution can reduce costs or improve compliance? If so, take a look at the articles below to learn more.

Do you want to review how good your current contingent workforce performance is? Why not take our free Flexible Workforce Health-Check to see how your business perfoms against the industry in terms of cost, visibility and compliance.

You can then benefit from downloading our 12 Key Pillars Of Flexible Workforce Management Guide that will help you improve some of these key metrics by developing your own fcontingent workforce strategy.