SAP recently announced a new capability designed to provide organizations with insight to better manage and optimize their total workforce of permanent and external workers.

The new product integration between SuccessFactors, an SAP company and a leader in cloud-based human capital management (HCM) solutions, and Fieldglass, a leading vendor management system (VMS) provider that is now part of SAP, bridges the gap between full-time employees and external workers by breaking down the siloes between human resources (HR) and procurement.

As the workforce experiences rapid growth of non-traditional, contingent labour, companies are adapting their people strategies to this new world of work. According to Workforce 2020, a recent study from Oxford Economics and SAP, 83 percent of HR executives intend to hire more contingent employees in the next three years. The rise in “flexible” employment presents challenges to companies in understanding, managing and optimizing their total workforce.

SAP enables HR leaders to include external workers in select HR processes. Users are now able to upload data from Fieldglass into contingent profiles in the SAP® SuccessFactors® Employee Central solution, making them visible to everyone in the organization through people searches and organizational charts.

Integration between Fieldglass and the SAP SuccessFactors Workforce Analytics solution allows companies to combine employee and contingent worker data to gain transparency and to answer key questions about their talent.

Lack of insight can restrict the capacity to act on workforce challenges — the integration between HCM and services procurement solutions from SAP enables companies to break down siloes and gain insights on all of their workers to help achieve business goals.

See: SAP Further Simplifies Human Capital Management Cloud

“The use of contingent labour has not followed its traditional path — as the economy has picked up globally, it’s increasing rather than decreasing. Having a full view of all workers gives companies a huge advantage into where their top talent is, and also enables teams to be more successful by better connecting people across the business,” said Mike Ettling, president of SuccessFactors.

Potential benefits from SAP’s total workforce management capability include:

• Maximized engagement, collaboration and productivity across all talent by applying HR practices and select talent processes to the contingent workforce

• Linkage between traditional and non-traditional workforce data — providing crucial and actionable insight into the total workforce and mitigating risks

• Direct integration between human capital and services procurement solutions — helping companies to obtain better visibility into all talent, better alignment of present and future business needs with the right resources, and better business results.

“Today’s workforce is more ‘blended’ than ever before,” said Christopher J. Dwyer, research director of Ardent Partners, a leading research and advisory firm. “Nearly 35 percent of the total global workforce is comprised of nonemployee talent, with that figure expected to grow steadily in the years ahead. As such, it is critical for businesses to develop ‘total workforce management’ programs that can effectively manage all enterprise talent under a single, centralized banner of systems and capabilities.”

‘Total workforce management’ can revolutionize how both traditional and non-traditional talent is managed by improving visibility into total enterprise talent (regardless of its source) and enabling superior alignment of business needs and projects with required skill sets and expertise.

Integration of contingent workforce and human capital management systems is an ideal ‘first step’ in building this type of program.

Also read: SAP, IBM to integrate HR solutions on cloud

Image credit: sap.com