I am hearing too much whispering about SuccessFactors, but we have almost missed to notice the youngest family member of SAP HCM i.e. Fieldglass. On March 26, 2014, SAP announced the accusation of Chicago based cloud based company Fieldglass. A small list of past accessions by SAP is below.
Acquisition | Technology | Founded in | Domain | Accusation by SAP in |
SuccessFactors | HR | 2012 | ||
Ariba | Java-based - at least for OnPremise installations [SOURCE]. Typical Ariba jobs usually require JAVA. | Supplier / Procurement | 2012 | |
Hybris | Java Based, J2EE architecture. [SOURCE]. | E-Commerce | 2013 | |
Fieldglass | Contingent Workforce Management and SoW Management | 2014 |
What were common among them and why SAP has acquired them. The common factors are :
- They are established players in their area not just start-ups.
- These are all companies which were/are largely hosted in their own data centers / other private clouds rather than public clouds
- These are companies whose main products are largely based on established Java-based technologies. Hence integration or unification will be simple by SAP
The strategic accusations by SAP is to gain market share by inorganic growth. This creates a diverse product portfolio for a leading competitor in highly competitive market. Personally, I think the real change started with the acquisition of BusinessObjects in 2008. This was the first big acquisition of SAP. It was SAP admitting that the World of business software was now moving too fast to build everything yourself. The SAP has must realized, Cloud is next big revolution. Today, SAP still has all of its traditional strengths (more integration than anyone else; industry solutions, knowhow and references; truly global reach etc), but it also has one of the broadest, largest and fastest-growing cloud businesses and by far the largest Business Network. SAP would able to balance the pain of one product with the support and integration of other product from its own portfolio.
Introduction of Fieldglass:
Fieldglass is cloud based application to manage contingent employee and supplier relationships. This cloud-based vendor management system (VMS) automates the full lifecycle of contingent workforce management and services procurement processes – from initial sourcing and qualification through performance management and consolidated invoicing and payment. Fieldglass is a platform that’s sits in the middle of buyers and suppliers and it takes care of all processes around recruiting and maintaining the contingent workforce (e.g. by providing time sheets, reports on headcount and compliance, etc).
Fieldglass is a solution to manage:
- Contingent labor across technology, healthcare/clinical, professional, creative, skilled trade and other specialized areas
- Statement of Work (SOW) projects and services
- Independent contractors
- Talent pools, such as retirees and alumni
It will facilitate to strengthen the relationship between the buyer and the supplier. For buyers, the requisition is simplified. For suppliers, they’re able to provide services in an expedited fashion. They’re no longer held up by complex or unfamiliar on-and-off boarding or approval policies. These highly manual processes are streamlined with Fieldglass. Buyers can create requisitions in just two clicks, competitively bid for services, benchmark their needs against the broader market, on-and-off board workers, capture time and expenses, automate invoicing and get detailed reporting and analytics.
Who should go for Fieldglass?: It is one-stop solutions of all below questions.
- How many external workers are currently on assignment for your organization?
- What is your annual contingent labor and services spend?
- Who are your highest-performing suppliers?
- What is your process for determining fair market value for contingent workers in different roles?
- Are your hiring managers happy with the quality and speed of worker engagement and onboarding?
- Are your finance, risk, and HR departments satisfied with current controls in place for engaging and paying contingent workers and service providers?
- How are you managing project-based spend such as SOW engagements in your organization?
- Do you have visibility into project-based workers?
The Fieldglass VMS tracks and manages every stage of contingent workforce management: hiring managers requesting talent, selecting a candidate for a position, onboarding, time-and-material tracking, payment processing and offboarding the worker. Once workers are offboarded, organizations can evaluate processes and run reports through Fieldglass.
Even if the scope of work is paid on a fixed price or by a milestone or deliverable, the hours can still be tracked and billed. Fieldglass supports labor-based indirect spend using any of payment schemes: – Milestone-based payments (Progress Payment)– Deliverables-based payments (Fixed Price) – Unit-based payments – Time-and-expense based deliverables A multi-bid SOW created in Fieldglass provides the service/bid requirements to chosen suppliers and can be created from templates or past bids, and includes workflow for the evaluation and selection of the best supplier. For more, please read http://global.sap.com/community/ebook/Fieldglass/enUS/assets/VMS_Overview.pdf
The Rise of the Flexible Workforce:
The workforce is changing. Each year, more and more companies are employing external labor and engaging service firms to help meet human capital needs. Independent contractors, temporary workers, specialized talent pools, and project-based services firms comprise a growing proportion of the global workforce. According to the Harvard Business Review (July 2013) contingent workers are the fastest-growing segment of America’s job market. This Oxford Economics study showed that 82% retail companies are increasingly using contingent emplo....
There are business benefits of having flexible workforce.
- Agility in response to demand, economic drivers, and government regulations
- Cost savings
- Efficient talent sourcing
- Quality of talent and suppliers
- Compliance
Total Workforce and Total Spend Management
Contingent labor and professional services are top procurement spend categories for many companies. Therefore, deriving the greatest value from this investment has become a priority for many organizations. Fieldglass, now part of SAP, helps make this happen.
Recognized by Forrester Research as a leader in contingent workforce management and services procurement, Fieldglass delivers an innovative, cloud-based solution you can use to better procure and manage the flexible workforce and statement-of-work (SOW)–based services. Together, SAPand Fieldglass offer software, collaboration tools, and networks to help you strategically manage your entire workforce and total spend cohesively.
Some statistics :
- US$3.3 trillion Annual U.S. spending on external labor (contingent and SOW services)
- 41% Increase in contingent workforce spending in the last five years
- 30% Expected growth of contingent workforce over the next three years
Complex Processes Simplified
The SAP Fieldglass Vendor Management System helps simplify procurement and management of your contingent workforce and SOW-based services. The system enables access to data needed to analyze your total workforce and total spend. Users can intuitively proceed through four comprehensive steps – sourcing, engaging, managing, and paying – with compliance and measurement capabilities to support every step.
SAP HCM/ SuccessFactors and Fieldglass Integration
Fieldglass offers standard connectors to link the Fieldglass platform to the SAP ERP HCM system. This means that the procurement and requisition will take place on the Fieldglass platform. This can be done in 2 clicks because much of the required information is pre-populated with data coming from SAP HCM. The position and job information from HCM org structure will to be available in Fieldglass through standard Fieldglass connectors.
After the resource purchase is made in Fieldglass the contingent labor record is interfaced back to SAP HCM. At many of existing joint SAP HCM and Fieldglass customers the contractors are stored in SAP HCM in a separate employee group. This provides the customers with full visibility into how many people are working and at which locations. This can also be achieved using the standard Fieldglass connectors which work with SAP NetWeaver PI to interface directly into SAP HCM. Via the standard Fieldglass ‘Worker Download Connector’ the following infotypes can be maintained:
- 0000 – Actions
- 0001 – Organizational assignment
- 0002 – Personal data
- 0007 – Working time (only for storing the normal work schedule)
- 0016 – Contract details
- 0901 – Purchasing data (with purchasing organization and purchasing group)
In addition to the HCM related data also other ERP related data around the vendor, the job seeker ID, cost centers, task codes, the billable per diem and pay rates are available in the Worker Download Connector. Integration with SAP and Fieldglass is flexible and it supports information flows from custom infotypes.
Disclaimer: The thoughts, ideas and analogies represented in this blog are limited to the manifestations of the writer and do not represent the official go-to-market strategy of SAP or any software provider.
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