Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Terri Gallagher, president and CEO of Gallagher and Consultants, and Brandon Moreno, president of EverHive.
Times are changing and clients are becoming more sophisticated and educated regarding options to manage and optimize their contingent workforce.
The managed services provider (MSP) model, which started 20 years ago as the “go-to” for contingent workforce management, is losing relevancy and the voice of the customer is confirming they want changes. Today, clients want a strategic business partner, true vendor neutrality, effective benchmarking and reporting, best practices and expanded supply chain options with digital platforms. They want to go beyond the current MSP “command and control” of cost control, process and visibility.
Internally Managed Programs on the Rise
According to Staffing Industry Analysts, 33% of global companies are using an internally managed program (IMP) model, and that number is on the rise. The reason? Companies are demanding better results from their partners, more strategic talent available on their teams and the potential to turn their program into a profit center.
An Internally Managed Program (IMP) is the contingent workforce management (CWM) approach of the future. It’s based on leveraging the best strategic talent available and incorporating innovative thinking and best practices. What’s driving this trend is the need for a company to truly be agile with its workforce and the technology that supports it. But most of the services performed by MSPs have been reduced to purely tactical, routine tasks: date ranking, mobile enabled alerts, onboarding/off boarding and other tasks that make up the majority of the traditional MSP service offering.
What’s Driving It?
Increasingly, clients have been expecting and demanding other, incremental-value-adding services from MSPs (such as direct sourcing, strategic collaboration, and workforce planning). In addition, at a time when technology-driven innovation and disruption are seeping into CWM, there also have been expectations that MSPs will have a strategic viewpoint and show that they are executing against it (for example, beginning to engage platform-based sources of talent). read the rest here