10 June 2021

What Workers Can You Manage With a Vendor Management System (VMS)?

Wayne Burgess
Wayne Burgess

There’s no doubt about it, the world of work is changing. The future of work is about building an agile workforce and strong staffing agency relationships. These steps ensure that your business is able to adapt to workforce challenges such as the growing skills gap. 

To address the evolving world of work, many businesses today are focusing on temporary and contingent talent to fill their workforce needs. However, with this come workforce and staffing agency management challenges that impact your company’s bottom line. 

To ensure the proper management of this process, many organizations are turning to vendor management systems (VMS) to manage their staffing agency process - but what workers do these systems help your business to manage?

First, let’s start with a quick recap of what a VMS is

A VMS is a cloud-based software platform that centralizes, consolidates and automates the management of your staffing agency process. That includes everything from onboarding, measuring vendor performance, managing staffing agency relationships, procuring workers, payments and much more. 

This is a step beyond the ineffective manual processes that many organizations (particularly those with smaller contingent workforce spend) use to manage their staffing agency process, such as spreadsheets, in-house databases and Sharepoint-like websites

Unlike these time-consuming and manual management methods, a vendor management system ensures your company is able to accurately record and centralize data across your organization into one platform. The result? Complete visibility and control of your staffing vendors and the workers you source through them.

This leads to significant money savings, more-informed hiring decisions, better vendor relationships and a huge amount of further benefits that drive your business towards higher profits and improved workforce quality. 

With that in mind, what type of workers can a VMS help your organization manage? 

Vendor management systems are designed to manage externally-sourced workers

Traditionally speaking, vendor management systems were designed to only address the management of hourly-based temps through staffing agencies - and some vendor management systems still only have these functionalities. 

In general, however, most VMS solutions now allow your business to manage the sourcing, billing and payment for a range of different workers sourced externally. This includes independent contractors, temporary workers (temps) and fixed-free contractors.

A vendor management system acts as a system for record for all externally-sourced workers and the staffing agencies you used to source them. That means you’ll have access to worker information, as well as key metrics such as staffing agency rates, time-to-fill, time-to-submit and turnover. 

No more fragmented information across your information for those workers who were sourced from vendors! 

What about my permanent employees?

While many VMS solutions will only address hourly-based temps and independent contractors sourced through staffing agencies, modern vendor management systems will be able to help your business manage the process to acquire, bill and pay a range of workers that are sourced externally.

Some VMS systems, such as Conexis VMS, now have additional functionality that allows you to manage all of your permanent hires  who have been sourced via a staffing agency. In addition, Conexis VMS enables you to manage your direct sourced contract labour. 

This is a perfect solution for smaller organizations, who don’t have the luxury of large HR teams and procurement departments who can separate workforce management by category. 

Instead, all workers sourced through a staffing agency (whether hourly-based temps, independent contractors or permanent employees) can be seamlessly managed on one centralized system - giving you complete visibility into, and automation of, your staffing agency workforce.


Want to learn more about how Conexis VMS can help you consolidate your entire staffing agency management process into one easy-to-use platform? Get in touch with us today. We would love to answer your questions and show you a free demo of our innovative software.

Wayne Burgess

Wayne Burgess

Wayne Burgess is the President of Conexis, a technology company focused on helping organizations get control of their Contingent workforce.

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