Supporting Your Global Workforce With an Innovative Vendor Management System
The use of contingent workers is growing. Here are six ways our vendor management system (VMS) supports global contingent workforce operations.
The use of contingent workers is growing. Here are six ways our vendor management system (VMS) supports global contingent workforce operations.
This blog was originally posted on VNDLY.com in November 2022.
As companies expand internationally, the use of contingent workers is also growing. Staffing Industry Analysts found that businesses across the globe spent $4.4 trillion on contingent labor in 2020 alone. With the anticipated growth of external workers set to continue, the need for processes and solutions to effectively manage global programs becomes an increasingly significant priority.
When contingent workforce programs extend across borders, navigating legislative and in-country regulations can be challenging. We understand these complexities and have functionalities in place to support your organization through invoicing requirements, employment laws, data regulations, and other hurdles.
Interested in learning more? Here are six ways our vendor management system (VMS) supports global contingent labor operations.
Our VMS’s innovative invoicing capabilities go beyond those offered by legacy VMSs by keeping global invoicing requirements top of mind. In addition to invoice consolidation and automation, we offer a number of features in this area, including:
Invoicing regulations vary from country to country, which can make it difficult to account for all requirements.
We also empower companies to leverage the expertise of local vendors by giving those vendors access to the invoice template generator. This moves the burden of compliance, taxation, and invoice creation onto those local vendors, helping businesses to remain compliant while saving time for internal teams.
Hand in hand with invoicing capabilities is the ability to bill in the local currency that a vendor requires. Our VMS covers all major currencies and a multitude of others, including the U.S. dollar, euro, Great British pound, South African rand, Malaysian ringgit—and many, many more.
In addition to invoicing in local currencies, it’s also vital that companies can access a single comparable view of spend across all locations. This is where reporting can come into play. Our VMS allows organizations to roll all spend into prebuilt or custom reports and view in a single currency. This empowers businesses to make decisions based on parallel information.
Local tax rates can vary significantly depending on location. As such, getting the right tax structures in place to support a global program is vital for ensuring the correct rates are incorporated—which in turn supports invoicing compliance and accuracy.
Our VMS provides greater control and visibility across tax rate management. Tax tables can be accessed directly through the system and are refreshed regularly. You can directly update tables to reflect important factors, such as the work site tax rate.
In addition, tax rate changes that you know are imminent can be set up and scheduled to take effect at a future date. In conjunction with this, an end date can be set for any changes that may only be a temporary government measure. For an added layer of clarity, you can add notes related to the changes made with everything tracked against the activity log in the system to facilitate full auditability.
Calculating worker pay and bill rates and the level of visibility required to understand how the bill rate was arrived at differ depending on location. For instance, in the UK, full transparency throughout the sourcing process on the various components that make up the bill rate is a requirement. This means companies need to show all calculations that went into arriving at the pay rate, holiday pay, national insurance, and pension contributions through to the vendor markup—and how all these combined to arrive at the bill rate.
Our VMS supports these complex scenarios by providing complete visibility into rate calculations. The system is easy to use and set up, enabling you to break down the configuration of these calculations into bite-sized chunks. We’ve made it so you have greater flexibility and control, and you can build calculations required for specific countries.
The system is easy to use and set up, enabling you to break down the configuration of these calculations into bite-sized chunks.
We accomplish this by combining any figures that need to be factored into a calculation with formulas. Formulas can be a full calculation or may make up only part of the calculation. These are then put into a broader set of requirements to simplify rate calculations. Once all the formulas are set up, they can be used as frequently as needed so you don’t need to continually set up the same tasks.
Furthermore, we are continuing to add calculation functionality across the system, under a broader order of operations project. This will eventually allow you to create calculations based on every possible scenario related to pay directly through our VMS.
Global programs can also carry increased complexities due to varying employment laws that must be adhered to. Failing to do so can result in a number of consequences, including substantial fines. That’s why our VMS has functionality in place to support a number of areas related to local employment laws, including:
Tenure policy adherence: Tenure policies vary between countries but have the same basic function—to ensure external employees are not working beyond a certain amount of time that could change their classification to a full-time employee. But the maximum amount of time an external employee can work for the same company in the same role differs depending on the location.
This is where our system’s configurability comes in. You can set up specific criteria and create alerts so you’re safe in the knowledge that the system will flag any employees nearing threshold limits. In addition, you can set up rules around any policy violations, identifying violations based on set criteria with the ability to have these flagged via email. All tenure information can then be accessed via an individual’s profile.
Need multiple tenure policies? We support this area as well, allowing you to add multiple tenure policies which can be edited per contractor. And we’re not stopping there—we have plans in place to continue to build automation in this area to streamline and optimize tenure policy processes.
Pay parity: In a number of countries, contingent workers are entitled to receive equal pay in line with full-time employee pay after a set period of time. Our VMS captures a number of data points that support compliance in this area. We have the ability to store information related to the pay parity rate for each job by title, location, and/or level. This information can then be reported to provide insights into current rate and tenure to inform decisions surrounding any rate change requirements that may need to be made. To add efficiencies, our system supports bulk upload of rate changes.
Time tracking: Another area governed by varying legislation is break entitlements. Tracking hours worked and breaks throughout the day is vital to ensure you’re remaining compliant and have a record should any concerns be brought to your attention.
We provide full transparency with timesheets supported across all locations, allowing employees to submit timesheets or enabling vendors to submit timesheets on behalf of contractors, if preferred. This gives you the visibility you need to see all hours worked and track break requirements.
Continuous user experience improvement is a key focus at Workday. We know driving user adoption rates is vital to our customers’ success. With this in mind, we’ve deployed a number of key language packs that will allow users to view the system in the language they most commonly use. Today, our VMS supports 16 languages including:
We also plan to add additional languages in 2024 and beyond.
With our VMS, local operations are supported by functionality that takes into account the differences that exist from country to country. This gives greater confidence in the effectiveness of global program management with assurance that compliance needs are met and financial controls are in place.
More Reading
Every large organization seems to be going through an HR transformation. But what has the constant refrain of transformation achieved, and has it really fixed anything?
Tom Nesteruk, an HR leader at AdventHealth, shares how his team transformed its HR operating model and leverages AI to take on one of healthcare’s biggest challenges—recruitment and retention of nurses and other critical roles.
Accelerate with Workday makes it easier than ever for companies to get started and see results with Workday—realizing 42% faster time to value. Learn how this new program helps keep organizations moving forever forward.