Workday has renamed VNDLY as Workday VNDLY bringing the extended workforce and vendor management system (VMS) closer to the global ERP giant. Acquired in 2021, the company now falls under the Workday suite of products extending the leading Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) solution with contingent labour management.
The announcement seems linked to the improvements in integration between Vyndly and Workday HCM. These will continue to strengthen with Mariana Santiago, Co-General Manager of Workday VNDLY, noting, “We plan to keep connecting and infusing more intelligence into the Workday VNDLY solution. We plan to infuse more machine learning into Workday VNDLY to bring the power of our Workday platform, such as planning and skills, to the world of the extended workforce to intelligently recommend sourcing strategy, optimize resource allocation when demands change, and guide creation of statements of work based on historical insights.”
Other integrations using the VNDLY API will likely follow with Workday Strategic Sourcing or Workday Financial Management for cost centre-based accounting, all being asked for.
What drives this is market demand. Organisations are increasingly turning to the gig economy to fill roles that are tough to fill or perhaps short-term in nature. Deloitte research indicated that only 30% of companies say they are sufficiently prepared to manage a workforce that will rely more on external contributors.
The link to Workday Planning is also important as it will allow organisations to better budget and plan for using gig workers. Recent research by Ardent Partners (The Future of Work Exchange Report For 2021) found that “41% of the non-employee workforce is accounted for in corporate planning, budgeting, and forecasting.”
Once that integration is in place, seeing how quickly that figure increases will be interesting. In the 2017/18 report, the number was closer to 32%.
Workday VNDLY
The Workday VNDLY business unit is co-managed by Shashank Saxena, Founder and former CEO of VYNDLY and Santiago, who has been at Workday for 7 years.
The VNDLY website is still active, and organisations can take advantage of its solution without the bigger investment in Workday. However, it means that enterprise customers of Workday can now better take advantage of what Workday VNDLY offers.
Santiago commented, “Organizations are no longer static. As an organization, you cannot achieve what you need if you are too rigid or static. If you have a dynamic organization, it’s like a living organism that’s moving and adjusting and doing what needs to be done to get to the goal. And that is driving the need to tap into every single worker in your company, not just employees. That’s orchestrating, where you’re identifying the skills and matching up the talent across workforce ecosystems with the needs of the business. The value of Workday VNDLY is that it truly enables dynamic organizations to approach talent as one workforce, working together.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
As Santiago notes, the nature of work is changing. In the gig economy, independent workers are more common than ever before. Workday VNDLY offers a solution for this. However, with the power of Workday HCM, organisations can now plan and operate a workforce that has no boundaries on how people work.
If the latest generation of workers fully embrace the new way of working, laid out by Lynda Gratton in the 100-year life, the combination of Workday and Workday VNDLY could prove beneficial. This coupled with the Workday Credentials solution launched in 2019, which could now re-emerge as its value becomes more apparent.
