Elance today announced that it has passed the $3 Billion threshold in spend on contingent labor and contractors managed in its Services & Contractor Management solution and unveiled new capabilities in Elance 5 designed to optimize global rollouts for its enterprise customers.  Elance's experience and capabilities lay the foundation for enterprises to reap the gains in costs savings, compliance and performance across their contingent staffing operations and broader services procurement initiatives.

"Acquiring contingent workers goes beyond finding the right resources. Contingent workforce management applications need to support procurement, payment, time and expenses tracking, and performance measurement against service-level agreements,” said Eric Karofsky, Research Director at AMR Research, in the May 2005 AMR Research Report, "Strategic Sourcing for HR: Talent Acquisition Landscape." "The workers must be treated separately from the hourly or salaried workers in the company because of dual employment laws."

Elance customers have managed $3 Billion in contingent labor and contractor spend across key functions including accounting, administration, call-center, engineering, facilities, healthcare, IT, legal, manufacturing, operations, and marketing and across multiple geographies including Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States.  Elance worked with its customers and partners to optimize contingent staffing operations and drive local and global compliance with key labor laws and practices.

Highlights of New Elance 5 Capabilities for Contractor Management

• Contractor Management Global Roll-Out Support - multi-national corporations require a single platform to drive contractor management policies across the world and Elance 5 introduces support for multiple languages (including double-byte support) and local rules & regulations. Enterprises can now ensure operational compliance with country-specific policies and rules enforced by the Elance 5 system. For example, Elance deployments in France require support for the European Union invoicing directive, request-reason codes, overtime law support and co-employment practices, all supported by the Elance 5 platform. These capabilities are critical for successful, compliant country-specific rollouts and complement Elance support for multiple currencies, languages and data formats.
• Enhanced Compliance - a key benefit of contractor management systems is not only to drive down costs and improve supplier performance, but also to enforce compliance to HR and corporate policies, including Sarbanes-Oxley, and reduce legal risk. Elance 5 introduces several features designed to improve compliance including enhanced visibility and control over change orders, effective-dating of rate-changes, supplier-initiated change orders, Women and Minority Owned Business information tracking, preference-driven maximum tenure and employment gap rules, derived candidate identification and among others.
• Contractor On-Boarding - mandatory enforcement of on-boarding tasks for contractors is a key component of any contingent staffing operation.  Companies need to handle a litany of tasks such as identification issuance, security clearance, systems access, signature of confidentiality agreements, drug-testing, and the like.  Elance 5 allows organizations to standardize and automate the execution of these on-boarding tasks, localized for specific geographies, organizations and categories.
  Enhanced Outsourcing Support - enterprises that outsource their staffing to managed service provider (MSP) or vendor-on-premise (VOP) program need a vendor-neutral solution to provide the underlying electronic system for the business process. Enhancements to support this capability in Elance 5 include rich configuration options for the Point-of-contact role for the contractor business process, with visibility and access controls.

"We are extremely pleased to achieve this historic company milestone, setting the bar for the industry, and to deliver the promise of additional global rollouts with Elance 5," said Keith Forshew, Senior Vice-President of Worldwide Field Operations at Elance. "This is a testimony to the success of our customers, in partnership with whom we have built a mature, deep and rich contractor management solution for local and global rollouts alike."