Leading Global Financial Services Group: Workforce Effectiveness

Active in more than 45 countries, this Leading Global Financial Services Group offers banking, investments, life insurance and retirement services to a broad customer base.

A European division of the company relied heavily on its temporary workforce to adapt to market developments, but the way it handled this workforce resulted in a number of problems that adversely affected performance, scalability, efficiency cost management and regulatory compliance.

Accenture helped the group design and implement a new model for managing its temporary workforce based on the benefits obtainable through business process outsourcing. The result was a multi-year program through which Accenture managed temporary personnel in one of the company’s European divisions.

The program was in use for more than four years at the group, where Accenture managed some 3,000 temporary employees. Within the first year, Accenture met or exceeded all service-performance targets and the model generated significant direct and indirect cost savings.

A European division of this Global Financial Services Group relied heavily on its temporary workforce to adapt to market developments, but the way it handled this workforce resulted in a number of problems that adversely affected performance, scalability, efficiency cost management and regulatory compliance:

• The group’s business units and departments hired external employees independently from multiple suppliers, resulting in administrative inefficiencies and forcing managers to invest more time hiring new external candidates.
  
  
• Decentralized hiring meant that the group was sacrificing leverage in negotiations with suppliers.
  
  
• The company lacked insights about its contingent workforces and could not determine the exact number of active temporary workers at a given time. This impeded high-level decision-making and resulted in inaccurate recordkeeping in IT and financial systems while raising questions among auditors regarding Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Accenture helped the group design and implement a new model for managing its temporary workforce, based on the benefits obtainable through business process outsourcing. The result was a multi-year program through which Accenture managed all temporary personnel (with the exception of IT professionals and management consultants) in one of the company’s European divisions.

Through an RFP process, Accenture selected a pool of the best qualified temporary labor suppliers and devised unambiguous service level agreements with them. Accenture handled the human resources, procurement and finance business areas as they related to the contingent workforce. Five processes provide an end-to-end service for temporary workforce management:

1. Recruiting, on-boarding and off-boarding
   
2. Employee evaluation
   
3. Administrative requisition-to-pay
   
4. Supplier management
   
5. Management reporting

Accenture’s model was in use for more than four years at the group, where Accenture managed some 3,000 temporary employees. Within the first year, Accenture met or exceeded all service-performance targets and the model generated significant direct and indirect cost savings, including:

• 15 percent savings on the direct cost of hiring external employees through tariff reductions.
  
  
• Savings of management time equivalent to three full-time positions for recruitment and selection tasks and savings equivalent to one-and-a-half full-time positions for the performance of administrative duties.
  
  
• Administrative efficiencies achieved through a 90 percent reduction in the number of temporary labor suppliers and a 90 percent reduction in the number of invoices.
  
  
• Reduced contractor costs achieved through price renegotiation enabled by the group’s improved bargaining leverage with suppliers.
  
  
• Reduced recruiting costs through the use of skilled recruiters and support officers and an overall reduction in expenses associated with recruitment marketing.

The group developed a higher-quality process for hiring its temporary workforce. The arrangement made the temporary workforce even more responsive to business demands, with time-to-placement reduced from an average of 14 days to an average of eight days.

Accenture subsequently renegotiated all contracts with the more than 35 suppliers of temporary labor, resulting in significant additional savings.