Managed Services Content

Workforce Logiq recently announced its partnership with Upwork, the largest global, online freelancing platform (in terms of spend, about $2 billion annually). The partnership — which is exclusive — is the first, officially launched, commercial relationship between Upwork and a managed services/solutions provider like Workforce Logiq.

To understand the deal, let’s look at Workforce Logiq’s history and where it’s going. Before we get to an interview with Workforce Logiq CMO David Trachtenberg, it’s important to see how this veteran provider got here.

The company is a well-established, global contingent workforce services and solutions provider, that is, a provider of MSP and other workforce solutions/services (such as contractor sourcing, compliance and payrolling services). With about $3 billion in annual spend under management, Workforce Logiq is also one of just two major MSPs that (a) are “vendor neutral” (i.e., are not a business unit of a larger parent company that has its own, proprietary staffing firm network) and (b) can offer clients a proprietary VMS solution.

Workforce Logiq has been undergoing a transformation in the past year or so. The company has a new senior leadership team put in place under Jim Burke, CEO and industry-outsider, who joined the company in spring 2018. The company also changed its name/branding from ZeroChaos at the start of 2019 to reflect its break from the past and look to the future. In a July 2018 interview with Spend Matters, Burke said: “I think of (Workforce Logiq) as a technology-enabled services business. That means we use our proprietary technology, data and global team of industry expert advisers to deliver a better service on behalf of our clients.” Accordingly, Workforce Logiq has been re-aligning to the market by providing the services and solutions that customers need today, investing in technology infrastructure and working with ecosystem partners to address customer requirements and pursue innovation.

In this two-part PRO series, Spend Matters provides a review and analysis of Coupa’s recent evolution in addressing the category of services spend, including Coupa Contingent Workforce. In Part 1, we provided an overview of where Coupa is at with the integration and leveraging of DCR Workforce.

First, we revisited the Coupa “services procurement” background/context leading up to the DCR acquisition last year. We also recounted our September 2018 briefing, in which Coupa discussed the acquisition and what to expect as far as integration (or “unification”) of the acquisition over the coming months. Additionally, we discussed what we learned from our most recent January 2019 briefing by Coupa on the current state of the integration.

Based on this analysis, we concluded that, six months in after the acquisition, Coupa’s integration at the organizational and product levels appeared to be on course. The priorities seemed reasonable even given the unique dynamics of the VMS market — and the plan, based on Coupa’s history of stamping out post-merger integrations, seemed on track.

But beyond this, what has happened to the DCR product under the Coupa umbrella? And how is it fitting into the changing world of services procurement — and potentially even help to shape it? In Part 2 of this research series, we will provide our own observations on where Coupa seems to be going, in terms of the contingent workforce technology solution segment and its increasing overlap with other procurement technology solutions.

Corcentric recently announced its pending acquisition of Determine (see previous Spend Matters PRO analysis: Transaction Overview and Customer Recommendations and Competitive Landscape Analysis — and news coverage here). But in buying Determine, what exactly is Corcentric gaining from a procure-to-pay perspective (i.e., product, solution and platform strengths and weaknesses)? And how do Determine’s capabilities stack up in the market overall relative to peers on a granular basis?

To answer the latter question, you can turn to the latest Q4 2018 SolutionMaps for e-procurement, invoice-to-pay and procure-to-pay SolutionMap Insider provider scoring summaries. For those interested in viewing Determine from a broader source-to-pay perspective, there is a SolutionMap for you as well. Each report provides comparative overall and “deep-dive” capability insight (e.g., catalog management, requisitioning, invoicing compliance, etc.) as well as detailed customer reference benchmarks. Determine is one of dozens of providers featured in these granular, comparative vendor ratings analyses — others include Basware, BuyerQuest, Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer, Oracle, SAP Ariba, Tradeshift, Taulia, Vroozi and Zycus — designed to aid shortlisting and selection decisions.

But to provide insight into overall product strengths and weaknesses for P2P, let’s dive right in today as we offer a summary view of where Determine stands out from the pack — and where it trails its peers. We’ll offer a similar analysis for sourcing, supplier management, contract lifecycle management (CLM) and spend/procurement analytics (collectively Strategic Procurement Technologies in SolutionMap) in a subsequent research brief in this series.

Welcome to the January 2019 edition of Spend Matters’ monthly feature “The Contingent Workforce and Services (CW/S) Insider’s Hot List,” available to PLUS and PRO subscribers. For those new to the Hot List, each edition covers the prior month’s important or interesting technology and innovation developments within the CW/S space, where change may be accelerating or at least becoming more pervasive.

This edition also marks the first 12 months of Hot List coverage, launched in the February 2018 inaugural edition (and covering January 2018). Our goal was to show that under the surface of the obtuse, clinical label of “contingent workforce and services” (CW/S) was a hotbed of technologically driven innovation. We sought to set the record straight, perhaps turn a few heads (maybe even provoke a double-take) and possibly prevent some unwary practitioners from getting burned. Hopefully we have fulfilled our promise.

To mark the first anniversary of the Hot List series, this month we will leave the usual format behind and seek a glimpse of the CW/S elephant in the room: complex services spend.

The real features of this spend category have (strangely enough) been obscured in the shadow cast by contingent workforce. And while there has been lots of talk about SOW spend in the CW/S world, in reality, that’s been a little bit like lighting a match in the dark to survey the full enormity of the elephant (possibly only seeing a foot or a tusk).

With that, we will now begin our safari, turn our searchlight toward the relatively unexplored territory of services spend and wrestle with questions like: What is it? How is it being addressed in different sectors? Is there a pattern emerging that may mean more and more effective ways for businesses to source and manage complex services?

In Part 1 of this Spend Matters PRO series, we summarized ADP’s business characteristics, its market and financial strength, and its increased investment in innovation R&D as a backdrop and foundation for the pursuit of its future-of-work strategy. In Part 2, we examined the significant technology developments and recent strategic acquisitions that make up key execution components of the strategy. In this third installment of this series, we will step back and provide our perspective on ADP’s future-of-work strategy, both our view of what it is and what it may mean in a broader industry context.

Spend Matters welcomes this sponsored article from Michael Werblun, chief executive at ZeroChaos.

MSPs have evolved as client expectations, industry advancements, technology innovations and new sourcing channels are changing the way organizations do business.

Traditionally, MSPs were narrowly defined due to the type of work that was outsourced. At that time, organizations had very distinct criteria on which they measured providers. It was all about managing hourly labor, sourcing talent, and performance. Fast-forward to today’s landscape – after nearly two decades into formal contingent workforce management (CWM) programs and MSPs – and it’s clear that the contingent workforce has changed, and resources are different and more readily available than they were in the past.

As a procurement professional, I’m primarily tasked with identifying the best ways to utilize our spend and influence to as to create the maximum advantage for my organization. Obviously, this is extremely valuable for the company but can sometimes leave me feeling a bit uninspired. As a purchases manager at a global consumer products company, I was known to say to my closest colleagues, “It’s just soap and toilet paper. We are not changing the world.”

However, several years ago I was presented with a rare chance to make a difference in a way that was highly meaningful for me. I may not have realized it at the time, but I was fortunate to work in an organization that called out supplier diversity as a critical factor in its business strategy. A category plan couldn’t be written that didn’t include a supplier diversity component, and an RFP or business award couldn’t be made without addressing how we will reach our diversity targets.

Spend Matters welcomes this sponsored article from Mark Morley, director of strategic product marketing at OpenText.

Over the past decade, CIOs around the world have been mainly focused on deploying complex IT projects such as ERP and CRM environments. These projects have high visibility with corporate boards as they are high budget, high in resource requirements and high in expectations.

Things have changed considerably today, as CIOs wrestle with new types of networks; new disruptive technologies such as wearable devices, 3D printers, advanced robotics, drone based services and the Internet of Things (IoT); and new types of structured and unstructured information coming off of these devices. The digital world is certainly becoming more complex.

Evaluating a comprehensive business solution can be tricky, especially when the organization is evaluating just software capabilities — which is to say “features and functionalities” — but the provider brings more than this alone. For example, it can be difficult to do apples-to-apples sourcing comparisons when considering the types of value-added services that a solution provider can offer (by itself or a third party) to complement or strengthen its own technological solution.

This fall, Spend Matters is conducting a survey of overall vendor management system (VMS) pricing trends in the market. But in the meantime, we thought it would be useful to share a joint perspective with an industry expert specifically around VMS and managed services provider (MSP) pricing and business model trends for supporting statement of work (SOW) programs. As SOWs become a larger percentage of typical services procurement expenditure in more mature procurement organizations — and as specialized technology and managed services offering continue to develop to support these programs on an end-to-end lifecycle basis — it is becoming increasingly important to think about managing these efforts in a dedicated manner. This Spend Matters PRO analysis provides insight into how procurement organizations can more effectively engage VMS and MSP providers in support of their requirements based on current pricing and business model trends,including supplier-funded models.

Spend Matters welcomes this sponsored article from John Dreyer, CEO of The Shelby Group.

In the delivery of complex outsourced services, there is often a disconnect between the prices negotiated during the procurement phase and the actual costs of what is delivered over the term of the contract.

Andrew Karpie and I have spent the past two days at Beeline’s customer event, speaking with dozens of people from all sides of the market — consultants, MSPs, customers and, of course, Beeline’s team, including a number of product managers. Andrew also attended IQNavigator’s customer conference the week before. At both events, a number of people we spoke with suggested how much they’d like to see greater coverage around the vendor management system (VMS) market.