Supporting Your Global Workforce With an Innovative Vendor Management System

This article was updated to reflect new information on 7/25/2023.

As companies expand internationally, the use of contingent workers is also growing. Staffing Industry Analysts found that businesses across the globe spent over $5 trillion on contingent labor in 2021 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 seven ways our vendor management system (VMS) supports global contingent labor operations.

1. Robust Global Invoicing

Our VMS’s innovative invoicing capabilities go beyond those offered by legacy solutions 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:

• Full digital invoice regardless of spend or location: Depending on in-country spend levels, legacy VMS providers often won’t provide you with full digital invoicing across all locations. We offer full digital invoicing—regardless of spend or location—alongside any of our solutions. This enables you to adopt a global standard for invoice practices, which is key to streamlining processes.
• Custom invoice template generator: Invoicing regulations vary from country to country, which can make it difficult to account for all requirements. Our custom invoice template generator solves this issue by enabling you to build invoice templates with the country-specific information needed and in the appropriate currency, which can be pushed out to local vendors.

We also empower companies to leverage the expertise of local vendors, if they wish, 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.

2. Extensive Currency Coverage

Hand in hand with invoicing capabilities is the ability to bill in the local currency that a vendor requires. Our VMS covers over 100 currencies, including the U.S. dollar, euro, Great British pound, South African rand, Malaysian ringgit—and  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 comparable information.

3. Clear In-Country Tax Structures

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 quickly 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.

4. Complex Rate Calculations Made Simple

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.

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.

Our VMS is continually evolving and our rapid pace of innovation is quickly moving us towards a place where we’ll be equipped to support even more complex scenarios by providing complete visibility into rate calculations. The system will enable you to break down the configuration of these calculations into bite-sized chunks. We’re making it so you have greater flexibility and control, and can build calculations required for specific countries. We’re continuing to add dynamic calculation functionality across the system. This will eventually allow you to create calculations based on every possible scenario you can think of related to pay directly through our VMS.

5. Easy-to-Use Settings Configurability

Workday VNDLY is designed to grow with your program. While a legacy VMS requires support tickets to be submitted in order to make changes or add custom fields, Workday VNDLY puts the power back in the hands of the customer with the ability to quickly flex and configure Workday VNDLY to work in the way you need. Our settings panel allows administrators access to a rules-based approach to configuration which can be set-up in line with local needs and unique program requirements. For example, the rates for a specific role can vary from location to location. Our VMS enables program managers to easily adjust rate cards in a few clicks to align with local market expectations in order to attract the best talent. As you grow internationally, you can easily self-serve and establish which custom fields, workflows, and settings apply to your workers based upon their job categories, location, and many more criteria.

6. Local Employment Law Support

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 to support your global program? We heard this need and enhanced our tenure functionality to allow for multiple tenure policies in one environment. In addition to this, easy-to-use rule-based criteria can be set-up to support you in determining which tenure policy should be assigned to a contractor. This may be based on things like country, business unit, region, work site, job category, job title and module. With this rule-based engine, the tenure policy process is optimized and streamlined to support your compliance needs.

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 rate for each job by title, location, and/or level. This information can then be reported on to provide insights into current rate and tenure to inform decisions surrounding any rate change requirements that may need to be made. To add efficiency, 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.

7. Expanded Language Packs

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:

1. Chinese (simplified/traditional)
2. Danish
3. Dutch
4. English
5. Finnish
6. French (Canadian)
7. French (continental)
8. German
9. Italian
10. Japanese
11. Korean
12. Norwegian (Norwegian bokmål)
13. Polish
14. Portuguese (Brazil)
15. Spanish
16. Swedish

We plan to reach 35+ languages by the end of 2023 and will continue to enhance and add additional languages in 2024 and beyond.

With our VMS, global programs are supported by functionality that supports businesses in adhering to the differing requirements that exist from country to country. This gives greater confidence in the effectiveness of global program management, which increases confidence when it comes to key areas such as compliance and financial controls.