For the buyers and category managers out there, especially those of you deep in the weeds of buying and managing commodities, here’s a quick rundown of news and thoughts from particular commodity markets. MetalMiner, a sister site of ours, scours the landscape for what matters. This week:
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for Upwork Enterprise, the solution provided by the global online freelancer marketplace. It combines technology and managed services to enable enterprises to source and engage freelance talent. The applicable SolutionMap category for this report is in Independent Contract Workers. SolutionMap Insider members can read about Upwork Enterprise's reviews in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of information from the SolutionMap peer review process. It includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
Spend Matters welcomes this guest post from Martin Konrad, co-founder of Shortlist, a freelancer management system provider based in San Francisco and with an office in London.
The UK government has announced that the IR35 reform introduced to the public sector in 2017 will also be rolled out to the private sector in April 2020.
What does this mean? In less than nine months, all medium and large private sector businesses using freelancers will be responsible for checking their employment status with every engagement. If it is determined that freelancers should be treated as an employee for the purposes of IR35, the business will need to deduct income tax and national insurance contributions from payments made to freelancers.
In this article, I would like to discuss how companies can determine their freelancer's IR35 status, and how your company can prepare for the upcoming reform.
Companies need skilled employees, but with unemployment numbers at the lowest levels in decades, available candidates are in short supply. And people with the skill sets needed for certain jobs and industry sectors are just not there. The hiring professionals are feeling the stress. The situation is compounded by the fact that Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age in large numbers. Finding workers to fill positions vacated by retirees will continue to present challenges, so companies that set up systems to keep retirees and other alumni as part of their contingent workforce will have a competitive advantage.
For the buyers and category managers out there, especially those of you deep in the weeds of buying and managing commodities, here’s a quick rundown of news and thoughts from particular commodity markets. MetalMiner, a sister site of ours, scours the landscape for what matters. This week:
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for WorkMarket (an ADP company), a cloud-based workforce management solution. The applicable SolutionMap ranking for this report is in the Independent Contract Workers category. SolutionMap Insider members can read about WorkMarket in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary from the SolutionMap peer review process. It includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of customer quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
For the buyers and category managers out there, especially those of you deep in the weeds of buying and managing commodities, here’s a quick rundown of news and thoughts from particular commodity markets. MetalMiner, a sister site of ours, scours the landscape for what matters. This week:
Much like in other spend areas, the contingent workforce and services (CW/S) mega category is being shaped by disruptive forces from multiple angles. The oft-cited talent gap is a major motivator, as businesses look in vain for missing skills — everywhere from IT to operations and even more creative fields like marketing. But also influential are broader economic trends, including the rising importance of business partnering to tap collaborative innovation and the digital transformation of just about every major industry.
The result is a gradual but quickening shift in the CW/S world away from finding placeholders for siloed FTEs toward a workforce and talent strategy focused on outcomes — whether that be training a new set of algorithms for a key software platform, translation and localization for a business’ flagship product, or a set of social media-optimized advertising to bring a major brand in front of a different audience.
This shifting mindset was on prominent display last week at Upwork’s third annual Work Without Limits Executive Summit, held for the first time in Chicago. Here are three takeaways from the event.
Fiverr, the online marketplace for creative/digital services, on Tuesday announced its latest product, Studios, which allows freelance workers to self-organize a project to offer an “agency-like team.” Fiverr, which successfully went public in June, and developments like this have been covered extensively by Spend Matters. Upwork just last week launched an “agency experience,” and a couple of years ago, Stanford University created “flash teams” to gather experts to work on projects.
Read more about the capabilities of Studios — and the future of work.
Spend Matters attended the ProcureCon Contingent Staffing Conference this week in a very peaceful Minneapolis. The two days were fully packed with presentations, panel discussions, roundtables, conversations with contingent workforce practitioners and solution providers. The conference scale was small enough to support substantial networking and conversations, but still a very robust conference. Based on the published attendee list, there were just shy of 100 buy-side practitioners in attendance from roughly 80 companies (most Fortune 1000 companies and/or well-known brands from a range of industry verticals).
In this article, I’m going to articulate my own key takeaways from the presentations and panels that I found informative and valuable. Once caveat: My analyst orientation/focus is around technology and innovation — and I’m also a bit of a “datavore,” so there’s some subjective filtering going on here. But hopefully my selective treatment will bring into focus some key areas of change that are in play for contingent workforce procurement practitioners at this time.
For the buyers and category managers out there, especially those of you deep in the weeds of buying and managing commodities, here’s a quick rundown of news and thoughts from particular commodity markets. MetalMiner, a sister site of ours, scours the landscape for what matters. This week:
This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews for DCR Workforce, a provider of services and contingent workforce solutions that was acquired by Coupa last year. The applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are Contract Services/Statement of Work (SOW) and Temp Staffing. Coupa bought DCR Workforce in September 2018, so this report reflects customer feedback of DCR Workforce before the acquisition. As of the Q2 2019 SolutionMap release, all Coupa users can access all contingent workforce capabilities as Coupa proceeds with the full unification of those capabilities into Coupa's core business spend management (BSM) platform. Spend Matters will evaluate Coupa’s solution in the future.