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Organisations increasingly rely on an external workforce, such as freelancers, and service providers such as IT consultants and specialised talent marketing companies. This is evident from the investigation into Services Procurement Insights 2019: The Big Reveal of SAP Fieldglass in collaboration with Oxford Economics among a thousand top people in 24 industries and 21 countries. The study was presented during SAP Ariba Live and Sap Fieldglass Summit in Barcelona.

About 42 percent of the workforce even consists of external people, the study states. In addition, 48 percent of the top people state that their company cannot do ordinary business without that external workforce. 59 percent also say that these external people help them to compete in a digital world.

Many top people also state that the external workforce is important or extremely important for achieving business goals. These include faster times to market (61 percent) and improving customer experience or customer satisfaction (67 percent).

According to the study, service providers therefore carry out vital work in an enterprise. They are a valuable source of specialised skills that companies need to compete in today’s digital economy. These include artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and the Internet of Things.

Management ineffective

On the other hand, many companies do not know how to manage these external employees effectively. This is certainly the case with service providers. This includes managing who does the work, their certifications and training, their access to systems and facilities, the quality of their work and their progress against milestones.

The main problem is that many organisations do not see service providers as a workforce. The lack of management of this “invisible workforce” can lead to insufficient project results and creates risk. For example, one in four projects of service providers was not completed on time or within budget, and 44 percent of the respondents sometimes, often or almost always experienced digital security problems with service providers.

In addition, only 27 percent of the top people appear to be very well informed about the progress of the service provider in relation to its milestones or what it delivered. 25 percent are very well informed about the quality of work at supplier level.

Solutions

However, the SAP Fieldglass report also comes up with solutions. For example, 11 percent of the respondents took tough measures to manage their service providers and to derive value from them. That 11 percent has a higher visibility on their service providers, they are stricter in their management of such assignments, and their service providers help them to compete in a digital world.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.