21 Mar Flextrack SOW Solutions: Key Benefits Explained
What is a statement of work (SOW) and why is it gaining popularity?
Most contingent workforce leaders already know why SOWs are key to setting clear expectations and rules around a project’s scope, but for those who need a bit of clarity, here’s a quick note on their importance.
An SOW is a tool that establishes alignment between customers and suppliers, allowing organizations to define scope, track and set deliverables and costs upfront. This ensures accountability, control, and efficiency. For this reason, SOWs have become increasingly popular for organizations that aim to be flexible and outcome-focused.
Not all vendor management systems are built the same
Due to their complexity, managing SOW contracts can be complex and resource draining without the right technology. This is why over the past few years, it’s become clear to leaders that effective Vendor Management Systems (VMS) must have full SOW capabilities. A VMS that lacks them becomes a hindrance to tracking milestones, controlling budgets, and streamlining collaboration.
Some VMS providers integrate SOW, ensuring compliance, cost control, effectively maximizing the strategic value of project-based work. A great VMS does it all on one platform, ensuring teams don’t struggle to use the tools available to them.
4 Benefits of SOW in Flextrack
Flextrack’s SOW management/services procurement provides a comprehensive and unified solution for managing all extended workforce needs.
Here are 4 ways you’ll change how you engage with and manage your contingent workforce in one secure, extensible platform:
1. Take control with full 360° visibility
Gain oversight into suppliers and contracts from one place, in one system. Track spend and project profitability across your entire organization while using on-platform reporting and advanced analytics to provide accurate information quickly, reducing compliance and risk.
2. Maximize cost savings and efficiency
With improved supplier management and contract visibility, you can reduce the stress of unnecessary SOW spend. Easily adapt to needs and changes with drag-and-drop workflows that allow you and your team to modify SOW labor categories easily – without waiting for IT resources or paying exorbitant consulting fees.
3. Mitigate risk and strengthen compliance
Standardize contracts across suppliers and automate compliance tracking to reduce costly legal risks and project overruns. By keeping all critical data on one secure platform, you eliminate data loss and aggregation issues.
4. Enhance supplier performance and management
Improved decision making is now the standard with real-time insights into supplier performance and automated approvals and tracking. Self-service capabilities reduce admin workload and empower teams to use the tool instead of going around it. Additionally, anyone can manage Time & Materials and SOW workers while using the predictive analytics capabilities to forecast supplier success.
How does SOW work in Flextrack?
From req-to-check, Flextrack makes managing SOW seamless by automating key processes, ensuring efficiency, ease of use, compliance, and visibility – at every stage. Here’s how it works:
Simplified requisitions and approvals
- Managers create an SOW request through Flextrack, specifying scope, deliverables, and milestones.
- Approval workflows automatically route the SOW to procurement for review and validation.
Smarter supplier selection and bidding
- The system sends bid requests to approved suppliers.
- Managers and procurement teams evaluate bids, compare costs, and select the best supplier.
Seamless contracting and onboarding
- Once a supplier is selected, Flextrack automates contract generation using templates.
- The system ensures proper onboarding, compliance, and approval tracking.
Real-time work tracking and milestone engagement
- The platform tracks work completion against milestones, ensuring payment aligns with deliverables.
- Automated alerts notify stakeholders of project deadlines and performance issues.
Accurate payment and performance insights
- Suppliers submit invoices through the platform, linked to contract terms and milestones.
- Flextrack ensures real-time visibility into SOW spend and performance metrics.
- Supplier performance tracking ensures future engagements are based on performance history.
Managing SOW shouldn’t be a burden on you or your team – it should be a competitive advantage. Considering Staffing Industry Analysts predict that SOW will see an increase in demand for the year ahead, it stands to reason that a VMS that streamlines SOW processes form start to finish will be transformative to your success.
