With Workday’s acquisition of VNDLY just over a year old, Shashank Saxena, co-founder and co-general manager of VNDLY, discusses the future of the vendor system management space and tremendous opportunities for our customers.
This blog post is by Shashank Saxena, co-founder and co-general manager at VNDLY, a Workday company. It was originally published on VNDLY.com.
It’s been over one year since VNDLY announced we would be joining Workday, and the bright future ahead is becoming clearer every day. As we look forward to that future, I’ll discuss why this acquisition is different from others in the vendor management system (VMS) space, how we plan to avoid the mistakes made in similar VMS acquisitions, and where we’re headed next. To start, we’ll share how we plan to drive critical areas, such as managed service provider (MSP) partnerships, the transactional percent of spend pricing model, and third-party integration support.
VNDLY’s history with Workday has always been one of collaboration and innovation. In August 2021, we became the first VMS with a certified connector for Workday Human Capital Management. Our workforce connector delivers a clean, easy-to-use application programming interface (API) integration that provides visibility across both the full-time and extended workforce. After the successful launch of VNDLY’s workforce connector for Workday, we proved that together we could provide better visibility into costs, workers, compliance, and more.
The exploration into this partnership provided our VNDLY executive team with the confidence that joining Workday would greatly benefit our company and customers. We have all seen acquisitions in which the acquiring company didn’t try to understand the VMS industry. But that clearly was not the case in our situation. As an example, by retaining transactional percent of spend payment models, VNDLY continues to hold indirect contracts through MSPs and grow these partnerships.
We’re committed to maintaining standard industry practices post-acquisition, and being a trusted part of Workday has spurred continued growth in the months since the deal closed.
Building a VMS that is user-friendly and provides depth of functionality requires a large, world-class team of engineers, user experience designers, product managers, and other talented professionals. With our new resources, we have expanded—and continue to expand—our teams with top-tier talent. In turn, we have been able to leverage our newly augmented expertise to deliver product updates faster.
One example is vendor-initiated actions that will provide vendors the ability to take bulk actions on work orders. Another major feature is language capabilities. We originally planned to begin expanding the languages our product supports in the first quarter of 2023, but by leveraging Workday’s resources and scale, we delivered 10+ global language capabilities in the third and fourth quarters of 2022.
VNDLY is Now Available in:
In addition to product innovation, we continue to commit to building on important relationships and standards that exist in the VMS industry—principles that have helped our VMS achieve success from the very beginning. We are specifically continuing to strengthen our:
Extended workers now account for 36% of the entire U.S. workforce, and researchers believe the number of extended workers will rise to 50% of the workforce by 2027.
Combining the financial and organizational support of Workday with VNDLY's existing VMS industry expertise strengthens our ability to accelerate product innovation and enables us to continue to foster and build upon our MSP partnerships.
The hiring landscape is evolving rapidly and, as such, hiring strategies need to change as well. According to Gartner, many companies are expanding their extended workforce to maintain the agility of their organization, hire the best talent, and remain competitive. As a result, extended workers now account for 36% of the entire U.S. workforce, and researchers believe the number of extended workers will rise to 50% of the workforce by 2027.
A VMS is an essential tool for growing your extended workforce while keeping costs in check and timelines on track. As your organization navigates economic uncertainty, a fluctuating labor market, extended workforce growth, and rising labor costs and it faces rapid digital transformation, you need a VMS that is built to anticipate and respond to today’s market trends, rather than a platform built more than a decade ago. By providing your team with a system that is easy to configure and self-service, your organization can adjust whenever it’s necessary without having to wait on customer support.
Powered by our acquisition at the end of 2021, VNDLY is maintaining and building a product that efficiently supports the sourcing, hiring, payment, and offboarding of extended workers in today’s market. With Workday’s support, we continue to be agile and adapt to our customers needs, even amid historic labor shortages and global events.
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