I moderated two roundtables on Tuesday about UK trends in contingent workforce management, at SIA’s CWS Summit in London. During the roundtables, about two dozen attendees discussed several notable trends:
Agency Worker Regulation (AWR): Since coming into effect last October, this is the hottest topic in the UK temporary staffing sector. The key question is, does AWR affect price or demand for temporary workers? The consensus was a clear “no” – one attendee said that AWR was like the Y2K crisis, lots of discussion and preparation but very little real impact.
Skill Shortages: Attendees noted that there were some skills shortages in high-end IT skill sets that were driving up rates, and suppliers were submitting the same candidates more often which indicates the available talent pools are reduced. The days of requiring 5-10% rate reductions during the downturn a few years ago seem to be over.
Expanding Programs into the UK: Rather than simply expanding existing US programs into the UK, attendees mentioned they were revisiting who the best providers would be and altering program approaches for the UK market, for both contingent workforce management and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).
Change Management: There was much discussion around reducing maverick spend and expanding programs. Attendees noted that a high-touch help approach (most often by an MSP) and indicating the cost and compliance/security benefits were effective at driving change – but only if pursued persistently.
Additional Regulations: Upcoming regulations that affect temporary workers and the staffing agencies include Pensions Act auto-enrollment changes coming in October, and Real-Time Information (RTI) for PAYE workers. While these regulation changes only affect staffing agencies, proactive buyers are requiring staffing agencies to describe their plans for complying with the regulations.
I spoke on a panel at the SIA Executive Forum earlier this month on “The Future of VMS”, and the moderator (Tony Gregoire of SIA) did a great job engaging an audience of staffing-company executives, about their questions and perspective.
The common denominator of the discussion was that supplier engagement is the critical piece to a successful contingent workforce program – their motivation and performance in proactively finding the best candidates for your organization’s requisitions. About half of the questions and “wish-list” items from the staffing executives revolved around the program structure (which is determined by the client and/or MSP), rather than the VMS software functionality.
On the software side, one key discussion topic was system integrations to staffing-company front-office and back-office systems to make their operations faster and more efficient. Other VMS advances the panel mentioned included mobile user interfaces and more performance metrics automatically provided to suppliers.
Staffing-company motivation and performance drives the ultimate performance of the overall program, so keep the supplier perspective top-of-mind when designing the program structure and process, and configuring the VMS software’s functionality and workflows.
The topic of SaaS architecture is gaining increasing attention, and that is a very good thing. Enterprise buyers need to be aware the underlying architecture can have a huge impact on their long-term SaaS ownership experience, even when the screens from two SaaS vendors show the same functionality.
In business terms, the underlying SaaS architecture helps determine the long-term solution value in many ways by asking questions such as:
Data Flexibility – Can client-defined fields be added? Can they be put anywhere on the screens? Are they reportable? Can they be acted on by business logic such as process workflows?
Process flexibility – Can processes and screens be fully configured to adapt to the enterprise’s vernacular and workflows?
Reporting – Are all data elements reportable? Is reporting real-time? Is reporting available 24×7? How fast is typical access to reporting?
Ease of integration – How many off-the-shelf integrations are there? More importantly in an enterprise context, how quickly can the software be integrated with the on-premise ERP/HRIS backbones with enterprise-specific configurations?
Performance and Scalability – How fast are the typical screens? As the SaaS solution’s data and user volumes grow, how will it perform and scale?
Longevity – How long will the current architecture last without requiring rewrites or re-architecture – 5 years and 10x data/user volumes? 10 years and 100x the volumes? How efficiently can the provider adopt new UI technologies for mobile and future unknown access methods?
R&D Efficiency – How much R&D effort does the SaaS provider put into functionality vs. architecture layers?
The last point is one of the long-term benefits of true SaaS over on-premises software – almost all R&D for a SaaS provider should be targeted at new functionality on the SaaS provider’s single optimized technology stack, rather than (for on-premises software) having to port across many underlying technologies, having to support and maintain the software on all permutations, and maintaining dozens of old versions of installed software on a mixture of technology stacks. The more R&D a SaaS provider puts into a proprietary database or programming tools – or if they eventually have to rewrite a component of their solution – the less they have for future free functionality.
With on-premises software, you get exactly the features in the current release that you install. With true SaaS software, you also get all the future features that the SaaS provider creates (with free automatic upgrades), so the SaaS provider’s going-forward product roadmap, R&D investment level and efficiency, and the underlying architecture should be key considerations in the decision process when selecting a SaaS solution.
A couple of weeks ago I hosted a roundtable on Managing Contingent/Temporary Labor at the ISM Services Group conference in Phoenix, which focuses on different aspects of sourcing and managing procured services.
The roundtable topic was “Challenges and Successes in Managing Contingent/Temporary Labor”, and seemed to be one of the most popular topics, probably due to the inherent challenges in this services spend category. Here are the top challenges and successes that came from the roundtable of procurement professionals:
Top Challenges
Achieving visibility: How many contingent/temporary workers, where they are, what they’re doing, and tracking all the required compliance-related data.
Managing ramp-up and ramp-downs in demand: Having a fast & effective process (balancing speed vs. quality), contracting optimally (contracting for services or people?)
Measuring and Managing the process: Gathering metrics across the enterprise (all locations), achieving consistent contract terms with suppliers, getting consistently good rates.
Determining the best owner: HR, Procurement, or both?
Improving results for end-users: Overcoming long fill times, little reporting, and complaints from end-users.
Top Successes
Centralizing buying and rationalizing the supply base: Streamlined management, gained visibility into consistent metrics, and negotiated better rates.
Utilizing standard contracts: After a “rush-effort” to quickly bring on thousands of workers in a cleanup effort, went back and revamped all supplier agreements over six months, and gained savings from consistent expense-reimbursement policies.
Negotiating contracts for service levels: Addressed issues of fill-times and end-user satisfaction, and gained onsite support from top-tier suppliers.
Co-ownership by HR and Procurement for program: With leadership support, gained ability to impose a new process and vendor marketplace.
Negotiating rate ranges by different methods depending on the type of work: Negotiate markup, bill rate, and/or pay rates.
One common thread in the conversation was the need (fortunately filled by VMS/Services Procurement solutions) for a new system of record that provided visibility and control into a revamped process for managing the various types of contingent labor, anywhere around the world.
When I was at Oracle OpenWorld last week, the key announcements were extensions in Oracle’s “engineered systems”, i.e., software and hardware optimized to work together and delivered in a pre-configured appliance.
Engineered systems are clearly central to Oracle’s technology-platform R&D direction, and they generate huge performance and capability gains. Announcements included Exalytics (analytics appliance), Supercluster (full-stack Solaris computing environment), and new configurations of Exalogic (application server appliance).
As an early SaaS adopter of Exadata (Oracle’s high-performance database machine), IQNavigator can focus even more of its market-leading R&D investment on functionality, user experience and business intelligence, while taking advantage of Exadata’s performance and scalability.
Clients and users are already seeing benefits, and look for many more in this blog in the coming weeks.
I moderated two roundtables on Tuesday about UK trends in contingent workforce management, at SIA’s CWS Summit in London. During the roundtables, about two dozen attendees discussed several notable trends: