To say that the Vendor Management System (VMS) market has been volatile over the past several years is an understatement. Global VMS provider Beeline has first-hand experienced the true scope of this volatility over the past few years: a merger with once-rival IQNavigator in late 2016, followed by its acquisition by venture capital firm New Mountain Capital LLC last summer (a company that also formerly owned staffing giant Alexander Mann).
Beeline CEO Doug Leeby kicked off the conference with an affirmation of the solution’s customer-first mantra before talking about the relative evolution of the contingent workforce technology space. “Gone are the days when we’re considered just a VMS,” he said. “ The integrations, the partners, our ecosystem…managing, generating, or sourcing talent, it makes sense for us to be in the middle of it all.”
Speaking about New Mountain’s investment in the platform, Leeby said, “[New Mountain] is a great partner. They truly understand our business and what we’re doing. It’s incredibly refreshing how they help us look at our business. It provides a great future for all of us in this room.”
As the non-employee workforce becomes a stronger component to the Future of Work, the convergence of CWM technology and the concept of “work optimization” becomes that much more important, something that Beeline seems committed to in the months and years ahead. “We need to try to understand the right mix of talent and technology to accentuate the best possible outcomes for businesses,” Leeby said, supporting the notion that the solution provider will leverage a talent-first mentality, coupled with a commitment to digital transformation, as its core guiding principles.
This sentiment was further supported by Beeline’s SVP of Product and Strategy, Colleen Tiner (who joined the Contingent Workforce Weekly podcast last year to recap the 2018 edition of the conference), who reaffirmed that the Future of Work is front-and-center for the platform’s current and upcoming upgrades. “We want to create an experience that helps you adapt to a future state of work that we cannot envision yet,” she said. Tiner dove into Beeline’s artificial intelligence-augmented approach (Beeline Graph), which leverages several AI models and machine learning-led functionality to help users understand the relationships between human capital supply and demand and the best possible talent matches for a given project or requisition. “AI should be about educating, not removing, decisions,” Tiner said in discussing the platform’s new Job Description Optimizer, which leverages various sources of information to build deeper descriptions, which can traverse beyond simple skills and perquisites to include “soft skills” and emotional intelligence factors.
New Beeline CTO Michael Madden (who has spent just over 100 days in the role) spoke of the company’s overall commitment to digital transformation, speaking of the solution’s ongoing goal of creating an intelligent user experience coupled with a robust microservces ecosystem. “We need to become a 100% software company that happens to work in the non-employee workforce solutions space,” he said, adding that innovation, not infrastructure, was a linchpin to digital transformation success.
Other highlights from the conference:
- Best-selling author and workforce management expert Eric Chester’s morning keynote on igniting passion in how people work. “The only way to attract and retain great people is to offer a culture that other employers who want those same great people cannot match,” Chester noted in his presentation, pointing out that the “gold watch” worker archetype is dead and that businesses today must empower their workers (“companies win by empowering people”).
- Innovation expert and best-selling author Josh Linkner’s closing keynote on “finding your spark.”
- CTO Mike Madden’s incredible definition of digital transformation: “The holistic treatment of linking a technology strategy with organizational change while marrying process efficiency.”
- Beeline’s continued focus on enhancing a key component of contingent workforce management: SOW management and services procurement. Tiner revealed an interesting fact: there has been a nearly 140% increase in adoption of the platform’s SOW/services procurement tool over the past five years. “It was only a matter of time before we saw the adoption we’re seeing now,” she said.
“The fundamental problems of 20 years ago in the VMS and MSP world were to bring order, sense, efficiency, and cost savings to the table in a way that served our clients best,” said Leeby. “Today, it’s all about the importance of the outcome. How pivotal is talent to the organization, the economy…the world? What I believe we’re doing here is noble work.”
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