The external workforce includes contingent labor, freelancers, gig workers, independent contractors, and more. It encompasses 44 percent of workforce spend, according to an SAP-sponsored Oxford Economics survey of 800 executives across the globe. Companies typically are able to manage the remaining 56 percent of spend on internal labor through HR systems. However, external workers remain outside of a total workforce view at most organizations.

There is a big opportunity for efficiency gain and better insight into labor spend. That’s where a VMS like SAP Fieldglass comes into play to track external workers. With integrations between SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors, a complete view of all people that are working for an organization becomes possible.

The benefits of those SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors integrations were discussed in the webcast “Total Workforce Management 2020.”

In that webcast, SAP demonstrates exactly how SAP Fieldglass and SAP SuccessFactors exchange data to populate fields across each system, and work seamlessly so that a user never has to feel they are moving back and forth. For example, when an external job requisition is created within SAP SuccessFactors, the hiring manager is automatically taken to SAP Fieldglass.

In SAP Fieldglass, most information for the job is prepopulated from what was entered in SAP SuccessFactors. All that’s left to do is enter a start date and end date for the job. Now the position in SAP Fieldglass and the position in SAP SuccessFactors are linked, essentially one in the same. If a change is made in SAP Fieldglass, it will also occur within SAP SuccessFactors and vice versa.

Benefits of Total Workforce Management

Once a company has built out its Total Workforce Management program, it gains the ability to look into both HR and external sources to fill vacant positions.

Perhaps there is an underutilized employee already on salary. That information would come from SAP SuccessFactors, but that employee can possibly be used to fill a job that was previously going to be filled by an external worker. Without integration, that salaried employee would remain on the bench, and the company would be paying for external work that could have been fulfilled internally.

SAP Fieldglass has found its customers can save up to 10 percent in the cost of managing external labor through a VMS. Adding in SAP SuccessFactors adds even more benefits and more potential cost savings.

What we’ve discussed here are just a couple examples. Be sure to watch the entire “Total Workforce Management 2020” to get a complete view of how SAP Fieldglass combined with SAP SuccessFactors can bring harmony to your internal and external workforce.