Workday and VNDLY: Our Vision for the Future of Total Workforce Management

The rapid pace of change has reshaped not only the nature of work but also who does the work—as in, the workforce. Companies are facing rising labor costs and a growing skills shortage, while at the same time an increasing number of workers are pursuing entrepreneurship over traditional employment. While gig work has been mainstream for years, these conditions continue to fuel the rise of contingent workers in the workplace—meaning those who are offering their skills through independent labor, such as freelancing or seasonal employment. By 2027, contingent workers are expected to compose a majority of the U.S. workforce.  

This shift in workforce composition is driving many organizations to develop a holistic workforce strategy, where employees and nonemployees are considered together as a total workforce.

That’s the vision behind VNDLY, a Workday company, which is an industry leader in cloud-based external workforce and vendor management systems (VMS).

Workday and VNDLY started their working relationship roughly two years ago when VNDLY became an access partner. Soon after, Workday certified VNDLY’s Workforce Connector, making it the only VMS with a certified integration with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM). This means that when Workday's acquisition of VNDLY closed in December 2021, VNDLY and Workday HCM were already integrated.

With VNDLY, companies fundamentally transform the value of a workforce composed of both full-time and contingent employees. VNDLY brings together procurement, human resources (HR), finance, IT, and legal, creating an end-to-end solution that gives full insight into external worker recruiting, negotiations around the statement of work, compliance, and billing. As a result, companies have a unified workforce optimization solution that will help organizations manage all types of workers—salaried, hourly, contingent, and outsourced—and support a holistic talent strategy, including workforce planning needs and compliance.

Workday and VNDLY: Elevating the Value of the Total Workforce

As a leading VMS, VNDLY addresses the gap between managing the extended workforce and aligning it with the company’s business strategy. 

It’s why global research firm Everest Group recognized VNDLY as both a Leader (for the second consecutive year) and a Star Performer in its “Vendor Management System PEAK Matrix® Assessment With Technology Vendor Landscape 2022” report. The powerful capabilities of VNDLY enable companies to think more expansively about workforce management, empowering them to more nimbly adapt amid changing economic conditions and, more acutely, accommodate shifting worker preferences such as increased flexibility.

“With the Workday and VNDLY integration, I can get full workforce visibility to attract, retain, and manage the best possible contingent workforce,” said Melissa Stegman, vice president, senior manager contingent workforce programs at Fifth Third Bank. “The integration enabled my team to take weeks and months off deployment timelines, maintain the integrity of our data, and create the flexibility to accommodate changing business needs.”

Here are a few highlights of what we envision for the future of VNDLY. 

Bolstering Workday as a Hub for All Workers

The VNDLY integration of extended worker data into the Workday platform bolsters the strength of Workday as a hub for managing and growing a company’s entire workforce. That means our Workday customers who have VNDLY can apply necessary downstream systems—such as badging, network access, email—to their extended workforce. 

For most companies, allocating privileges and permissions (i.e., provisioning) to the extended workforce is distributed over many systems. But having provisioning capabilities in one system, such as with the Workday and VNDLY integration, helps companies ensure security protocols are applied across the workforce, including properly deprovisioning extended workers from the systems after completion of their contract.

VNDLY is continuing to enhance, globalize, and scale its integration into other Workday solutions, bolstering the capability to have visibility over the entire extended workforce and seamlessly translate business processes into business value.

Building a Unified Workforce

With contingent workers becoming a larger part of a company’s employee mix, an increasing number of companies are giving HR more ownership over the extended workforce. Yet in most companies, contingent workers are not usually accounted for in the organizational budgeting, planning, and forecasting activities. For HR, that lack of visibility means they can’t accurately plan and measure the impact of future skills and hiring needs. 

But with the integration between Workday and VNDLY, data flows seamlessly between the two systems, creating a unified data foundation. 

Consider First Financial Bank:

“Prior to using the integration between Workday and VNDLY, our team had a manual process that involved generating reports, transmitting data to VNDLY, and waiting for them to be uploaded,” says Joe Hoskins, vice president, director of HR systems and operations at First Financial Bank. “While we could have used a standard file delivery integration, we were thrilled to be able to leverage VNDLY’s Workforce Connector to seamlessly integrate VNDLY with Workday. Through the integration, we can pull data directly from Workday into VNDLY to keep everything in sync. This not only provides us with more efficient system administration experience, but also a seamless experience for our hiring managers who have access to the correct data in both systems.”

Moving forward, Workday and VNDLY are delivering a comprehensive solution that truly enables a holistic talent strategy. To achieve that vision, we are focusing on helping our customers build a robust system of record, one that includes worker data of both their full-time and extended workforce.

That unified data foundation will power all Workday applications, giving companies the ability to mobilize their full-time and extended workforce across the Workday suite. That means companies will gain the freedom to directly source contingent labor through Workday Recruiting, assign specific learning and safety courses by worker type through Workday Learning, and discover insights into employee engagement scores by worker mix through Workday reporting and analytics—and so much more. 

Ultimately, Workday and VNDLY are enabling companies to strategically manage the unique needs of employees and, as a result, rapidly respond to changing business demands.

Infusing Machine Learning and Business Process Automation With Workforce Optimization

From what our customers come to expect at Workday, VNDLY leverages machine learning technology and automation to help companies optimize their workforce strategy to include contingent workers. Picture this: Companies are always strategizing and forecasting the skills or talent needed for a business initiative. With process automation, companies are able to reduce the time it takes to get critical skills in place and can utilize machine learning to optimize their candidate review process. Organizations will be better placed to leverage insights from across Workday and VNDLY to rationalize the hiring of a full-time or contingent worker based on historical retention rates, loaded labor costs, and available skills within internal and external talent pools.

Powering the Future of Work With Total Workforce Management

To navigate rapidly changing business needs and attract workers with in-demand skills, companies need to think more expansively about their worker ecosystems. An integrated approach to managing talent regards every worker as a partner who can drive business impact. With Workday and VNDLY, companies can flex their workforce with extended workers, fill critical skills gaps, and have a holistic workforce strategy and approach that incorporates all workers as a total workforce—or in other words, power the future of work. 

Purchase a Workday Rising 2022 digital pass to watch the VNDLY product vision keynote and learn more about VNDLY’s latest product innovations.