SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced the general availability of SAP® Fieldglass® Assignment Management, a new solution to help manage contractors performing ad hoc work under existing supplier agreements. The solution simplifies assigning and managing work projects across multiple workers and variable pay rates, enabling operations managers to quickly deploy assignments, minimize downtime and maximize return on investment.
Companies in asset-intensive industries such as oil and gas, chemicals, utilities and mining rely heavily on contractors to perform ad hoc maintenance and project work. These external workers are often assigned simultaneously to multiple projects. But each project may be managed individually under separate contracts, often across disparate systems. This makes it difficult to find and deploy the right resources with the right skills for each job, pay those hourly workers on time while enforcing contract compliance, and track hours and costs against purchase orders, cost centers and work orders.
“SAP is providing a solution on a single platform on which companies can manage the complexity of multiple projects with several contractors under one supplier agreement,” said Mickey North Rizza, IDC Program Vice President of Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce. “This solution limits up-front sourcing for every project and reduces overall supply agreements while extending information into the manufacturing operation systems and ERP.”
External labor accounts for 42% of total workforce spend, according to a recent report by SAP and Oxford Economics. Although 55% of the executives surveyed said that their company would be unable to conduct business as usual without an external workforce, many organizations lack visibility and insight into this large, strategic spend category. The SAP Fieldglass Assignment Management solution helps provide transparency, flexibility and control with a single interface to simplify how organizations manage contractors deployed on an as-needed basis within gated facilities.
“As the portion of business spend on external labor grows, companies need full transparency into their external workforce operations,” said SAP Fieldglass General Manager Arun Srinivasan. “SAP Fieldglass Assignment Management enables organizations to better control their costs with a highly configurable, integrated tool. Businesses in asset-intensive industries can be confident that highly skilled contractors have access to the right facilities to complete the critical maintenance work while ensuring billing is done accurately and labor regulations, including worker safety, are followed.”
Already an industry leader in external workforce management, SAP is responding to customer demands with the release of SAP Fieldglass Assignment Management to empower organizations with:
- Visibility to improve cost control and results. Pay rules help manage compliance at the contract and location level, and businesses can track standard time and overtime on a daily basis.
- Flexibility to increase speed and productivity. Integration with gate pass systems and embedded smart logic help ensure more accurate calculation of working time with fewer errors, enabling organizations to help keep their maintenance crews and operations running smoothly to minimize downtime and disruptions.
- Confidence to manage compliance and security risks. Better tracking and management of work assignments help ensure contractors have access to the proper facilities and that on- and offboarding are standardized across workers. This helps to mitigate risk and increase compliance with local labor regulations.
