When human resource departments think about a company’s workforce, they are typically focused on the full- or part-time employees that exist on a permanent basis and fit nicely into an HR system like SAP SuccessFactors®.
However, those employees aren’t the only ones providing work for most organizations—non-payroll external workers including contingent labor, SOW workers, independent contractors and freelancers may often make up a substantial portion of a company’s total headcount. To support those other external workers, SAP provides a holistic offering called Total Workforce Management.
From a software standpoint, SAP Total Workforce Management is the integration of SAP Fieldglass—SAP’s contingent labor procurement and management tool—with SuccessFactors Employee Central in order to create a comprehensive view of all the people that provide work to a company. This typically comes down to being able to produce complete headcounts and a better view of spend, but there is more to total workforce tracking then just people numbers and spend —other items such as training, education, site tagging, onboarding/off-boarding and equipment provisioning for those contingent laborers are also major organizational pains that Total Workforce Management attempts to control.
The Total Workforce View
Fieldglass provides customers with a centralized system to keep track of all contingent workers. Companies who don’t run systems like Fieldglass typically have disparate records, kept within departments, on who is being hired to do what for which project. That makes it tough to keep track of the spend and headcounts overall. Fieldglass customers are able to capture that information and provide accurate reports on external labor.
Integration with SuccessFactors takes this a step further—it brings external worker information into the core HR system to combine it with the internal worker data and position information. That allows an organization to match HR position profiles with requisition requests and eventually create a contingent worker profile—similar to an employee profile for an internal worker.
Why Integration Matters
Why can’t SuccessFactors handle the external employee data on its own? It comes down to the core data model of the software, as well as compliance issues, explains Paul Rose, Rizing Center of Excellence Practice Manager for Employee Central, in a video shot with Rizing HCM President Luc Hédou at SuccessConnect Berlin.
“From a pure SuccessFactors standpoint, we have a limited data set,” says Rose. “Data that businesses would be storing on contingent workforces will not be as rich as an employee, and it cannot be as well just due to legal restraints.”
Bringing HCM Sophistication to Vendor Management
With Employee Central’s focus on the internal worker, it’s important for companies who utilize large numbers of external workers to understand what Fieldglass and its integration with SuccessFactors can do for managing those vendors that supply contingent labor, says Hédou.
“Fieldglass is truly a more advanced vendor management system which can store a much more complex data set around contingent workers, and also provide additional functionalities around statements of work and how to manage them,” he explains.
Hédou says, for example, some of our customers in heavy industries struggle to get a total headcount because they have a significant volume of external workers, opening themselves up to compliance risk. Overall, there is uncertainty around contracts and invoice accuracy without the level of sophistication that exists around internal workers. Fieldglass provides that sophistication.
Integration between the two systems takes it a step further, giving a total view of a company’s workforce, no matter their designation.