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What Is Enterprise Freelance Management System( FMS) and Who Needs It?


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An enterprise freelance management system ( FMS) works as a software package enhancing the user experience for independent contractors, service providers, freelancers and enterprises. An FMS can add tremendous value to organizations managing one-off vendors, fixed-term contractors, pay-as-you-go contractors and more. FMS solutions work towards supporting and automating core business processes. Equipped with in-depth reports and analytics, an FMS can dramatically cut onboarding and talent management costs.

Businesses face challenges related to an ever-changing business climate and this is especially valid in times when the revenues are unpredictable and increased flexibility has the power to move the needle in the right direction. Relying on contingent workforce and service providers is often the solution that helps businesses stay afloat. However, managing service providers and independent contractors is anything but easy.

There are various enterprise vendor management systems like SAP Fieldglass, Taulia, Work Market and Coupa but not all businesses can afford the cost of integration and post-integration maintenance. Luckily, there are freelancer management systems that are easy to integrate and within the budget. 

Benefits and Features of Enterprise Freelance Management Systems

A good Freelance Management System shall support end-to-end process automation including attracting talent, applicant tracking, talent onboarding, talent management, reporting, analytics, payment and billing automation.

ATS / Applicant Tracking System

Attracting top talent requires integrations with job boards, tracking every step of the interview process and insights into the quality of applicants, their motivation and desired pay rates. Ideally, an ATS shall equip hiring managers with information about the candidates, results from prior job interviews, the type of roles they have applied for in the past, their skills and competencies, etc. Keeping track of candidate activity in one place from the first time the candidate applied for a job with the company until the moment s/he joins the company or rejects a job offer is essential for making informed hiring decisions. 

An AI-driven ATS takes the hiring process a step further predicting the chances of a candidate being successful by learning from hiring patterns, the test results and skills of successful candidates, the reasons for job offer rejection and more. 

Onboarding

Onboarding your team shall be a click of a button in all cases. Those candidates who have accepted their job offers shall be seamlessly added to the talent pool and assigned an employment type - eg. employee, fixed-term contractor, pay-as-you-go contractor, milestone contractor, service provider, etc. The same is valid for existing team members that are asked to start using a new workforce management system. 

Data Privacy

The legislation landscape across the globe is complex and businesses need to have peace of mind that the personal data of their employees, contractors and service providers is protected at all times. 

A good workforce management system shall ensure compliance with GDPR and the applicable data privacy legislation at all times. 

Project Management & Work Flows

When contingent workforce and independent contractors are concerned, project management and workflows are of utmost importance. 

How to quickly find information about the skills of the independent contractors and service providers? How to manage project deliverables and quality of work? What if the same independent contractor works simultaneously on several projects? 

A good freelancer management system ( FMS) allows project managers to index freelancers and service providers based on their skills and other criteria and group them in ''competency clouds''. Information about negotiated pay rate, availability, quality of work and more shall also be easily accessible to empower an informed decision-making process.

Payment Automation

Imagine that your company manages a team of 300 freelancers. All of them need to get paid once the project deliverables are accepted and the quality of work has been assessed by the respective project manager. On top of that, the freelancers are living in and paying their taxes in various countries. To make it more complicated, some of them preferred to be paid in local currency, some in convertible foreign currency and some are willing to be paid into their e-wallet accounts.

How to manage it all and ensure that everyone gets paid timely and there are no duplicate payments?

A good freelancer management system ( FMS) will fully automate the payment process, validate the payment details and ensure that each payment is transferred only once taking into account the preferred payment method of each freelancer or independent contractor. 

Who needs an Enterprise Freelance Management System ( FMS)?

To achieve flexibility, most businesses have already diversified their workforce and rely on a healthy mix of full-time employees, independent contractors, experts, consultants and freelancers. To effectively manage their contingent workforce, businesses of all sizes need a freelancer management system. 

Examples of Businesses Using Transformify FMS

A movie production company in Asia

To shoot a single movie, our client needs at least 7000 people to participate in battle scenes. All of them are to be paid once the battle scene shooting is completed and are classified as external service providers on-demand.

How to source 7000 people on-demand, collect their payment details, ensure that they can issue tax-compliant invoices and avoid duplicate payments?

With Transformify FMS, the movie production company keeps more than 20 000 people in their on-demand talent pool. Their properly indexed based on their competencies and the movie shooting projects they have been involved in in the past. Each of these independent service providers has a profile with Transformify and can provide and edit their payment and invoice details, upload and share documents with the movie production company, etc.

Needless to say, all invoices are issued automatically and the independent service providers are paid via a click of a button. 

What is even better is that Transformify acts as Company-as-a-service. Hence, the movie production company has just one supplier - Transformify FMS and does not need to deal with thousands of independent service providers directly, create thousands of records in its vendor master databse and reconcile thousands of payments. One invoice and one payment - to Transformify FMS.

A Retail Chain in the UK

Who said '' We need promoters and we need them now?'' 

The retail chain promotes a variety of products on a regular basis. Think of free samples of toothpaste, cookies, chocolates, salami and the list goes on and on. The thing is that for the customers to be provided with free product samples, the retail chain needs to source thousands of promoters each weekend across the UK.

You may think '' Ok, if the promoters are needed each weekend, then the retail chain already has a big database.''. That's true but are all these people available each weekend? How to quickly obtain information on which of them are available this weekend and fill in the gaps quickly?

The simple answer is '' By using Transformify ATS and FMS''.

Transformify FMS provides an overview on the availability of thousands of independent contractors, their location and pay rates. Also, the project managers can check the comments left in the profile of every independent contractor, their rating and negotiated pay rate. 

What if this weekend 200 promoters are needed in Manchester but only 130 are available?

No need to panic. Transformify AI-driven ATS ( Applicant Tracking System) can help source promoters in less than 24 hours. All posed jobs are automatically indexed by 100+ free job boards and there are millions of freelancers and independent contractors in Transformify database to choose from.

Whatever the business needs are, Transformify workforce management system is the HR software of choice to seamlessly manage and pay your workforce, both in-office and remote.