The Department of Information Technology at a major U.S. city government uses staff augmentation on-demand to support IT projects across the city. The program includes eight vendors, and the department is responsible for maintaining compliance and managing spend across the program.
Due to an agreement with city oversights, contract usage is limited to:
- Short-term assignments (two years), and/or
- Hard-to-recruit technical skills or specialties, and/or
- Urgent need
The department needed to adhere to the agreement, regulatory compliance, contract burn, and budgets across the program. Plus, its stringent hiring process includes a custom scoring system with multiple parties involved. It needed a way to capture each step throughout the contingent labor lifecycle.
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The Challenge
At the beginning of the project, the program was pieced together through multiple systems. It started with an in-house developed system to manage the request process, but that proved to be unsupportable. Moving to a requisition system improved the request workflow for the IT department, but it only managed a portion of the entire program’s process.
To augment the gaps left by the requisition system, the department relied on a separate system for timekeeping, while communication and documentation was spread across Microsoft Office tools Outlook, Word, and Excel to tie together an end-to-end process.
This reliance on multiple systems for individual pieces of the process resulted in a lack of visibility into citywide usage of the program. There were delays in approvals, invoicing backlogs, and consultants were able to go over burn on their contracts.
The Solution
VectorVMS provides this city government IT department with the visibility it needs to adequately manage its program. The vendor management system (VMS) is a single-source, end-to-end solution for managing contingent labor. Once implemented, the department was able to eliminate redundant processes and improve efficiency across the entire program.
VectorVMS is configurable, allowing the department to have its scoresheets built directly into the platform through business intelligence for interview standardization. With role-based permissions, everyone involved in the process has access only to the information they need.
The solution is vendor-funded, meaning there are no ongoing costs to the IT department for access to the VectorVMS platform.
The Results
Once implemented, the government IT department saw improvements across the program. Despite a 120% increase in the number of days to receive approval from the city’s budget office due to the pandemic, the overall time it takes to request and onboard temporary IT consultants has decreased by 15%. VectorVMS has helped the department to streamline its process in several areas, including a nearly 100% decrease in the amount of time to submit a request after creating it, and a 30% decrease in the amount of time needed by the contract officer to process the request.
VECTORVMS SAVES TIME:
- 15% reduction in time to request and onboard staff
- Nearly 100% reduction in time to submit requests
- 30% reduction in processing time
With improved visibility, the team is able to get a complete picture of contract usage. All documents were standardized, with identifying contract data entered just once and tracked through the entire term. With several requisition classes that require different sets of capabilities and experience, the department is able to maintain compliance with all documentation on the VMS.
This city government IT department also found it was able to stay on top of contract expirations and funding usage by setting notifications where it needed them. The department was able to reduce the time spent tracking down information for contracts that went over burn, and even pass the responsibility of fixing timesheet errors to its sourcing vendors. With all of the necessary information easily accessible, the department minimized delays to invoicing.