Increasingly frequent disruption from geopolitical crises, natural disasters, and the pandemic itself have led to financial pressures across the globe. Whether it’s the rising cost of construction materials, paying more at the pump, or seeing your grocery bill rise, everyone is feeling the financial pressures – including employed individuals.

According to EY’s recent report on On-Demand Pay, “When this stress is carried into the work environment it manifests as distraction, absenteeism, reduced performance and ultimately employee turnover. 20% of employee turnover is attributable to financial stress and we estimate the combined effect of this to cost employers in the US and the UK c.$300bn annually.” [1]

Agile Procurement Insights Research

Labor supply chains remain vulnerable. Employers are faced with the need to adopt new strategies to support remote work, hire more external workers, and implement new processes to support automation. SAP, in collaboration with Oxford Economics, surveyed 1,000 global procurement and supply chain executives and found that 42% of workforce spend is on contingent labor and service providers. Only 14% of the executives felt they were managing this spend category effectively. [2]

Implementing a Vendor Management System (VMS) like SAP Fieldglass allows employers to be proactive when considering the pay of external workers. SAP Fieldglass allows for labor rates to be properly managed in 190 countries while ensuring that invoices are accurate and compliant. This leads to workers who are paid on time and increased satisfaction. Happy workers lead to increased hiring manager satisfaction – a win/win for both sides.

Both the SAP Fieldglass Contingent Workforce Management application and the SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement application allow employers to manage their global external workforce from a centralized system. Timesheet tracking allows managers to keep pace with the time and allocated hours that workers enter via desktop or mobile applications. Managers can also track invoice and payment by automatically generating invoices and approvals based on timesheets. Additionally, the SAP Fieldglass Services Procurement application allows managers to validate and approve work once they ensure services were performed as expected. This can also be completed from a desktop or remotely with an SAP Fieldglass mobile application.

SAP Fieldglass provides a rich set of web-based time and expense sheet functions such as workflow, time entry, expense entry and budgetary controls. A company’s business needs for time and expense sheets can be modeled at the organizational level and can be tailored for different types of workers across the organization. SAP Fieldglass also provides a standard timesheet upload tool that can be integrated with third-party time-reporting tools. The tool ensures timesheet and invoice accuracy by recording accounting information such as the cost centers, task codes and purchase order numbers on the order and carrying it forward to these documents.

The workforce wants to be financially ready for the expected and unexpected and being paid accurately and on-time is key to preparedness. A VMS system like SAP Fieldglass allows employers to support a growing percentage of the workforce with accurate and on-time pay while also supporting their own needs for accuracy in reporting. Learn more about how SAP Fieldglass offers solutions for the modern external workforce here.