Case Study: How Manpower UK Achieved IR35 Compliance With Gatekeeper

The system has been an absolute crutch for us" - Sophie Lees, Head of Supply Chain.

Name: Manpower
Location: United Kingdom
Description: ManpowerGroup is a world leader in innovative workforce solutions. Every day, they connect more than 600,000 people to meaningful work across a wide range of skills and industries helping to power the success of clients around the world.
Key Stakeholders for Gatekeeper: Vendor Management & Supply Chain

Summary

Gatekeeper was selected by Manpower UK on the strength of its pre-existing work with other parts of Manpower’s European operations.

Manpower UK had dual goals that needed to be addressed:

1. Managing a specific project that had been initiated in response to a key reform in UK legislation relating to the management of vendors and off-payroll workers. This project came with a government-set deadline that had to be met.
2. Standardising and modernising their vendor and supply-chain function by creating a central repository for all vendor information and automating their business processes

Gatekeeper’s flexibility made it the ideal solution for both of these requirements. Its integrated redlining and negotiation feature, eNegotiate, enabled quick updates to the records of Manpower’s 700 suppliers, while its core automation engine could digitise all of the team’s manual processes.

With Gatekeeper, the Manpower team have been able to hit both their short term and longer term goals; they’re prepared for the new legislation more than 6 months in advance of the deadline, and their supplier data is now securely stored in Gatekeeper.

Why Gatekeeper?

1. Proven success in other parts of the Manpower Group. Gatekeeper had already been implemented elsewhere within the European group at Manpower, each with slightly different use cases. In both instances, the feedback was extremely positive about the impact that Gatekeeper had made on their day-to-day operations.
2. Integrated redlining and negotiation. The stakeholders at Manpower UK were particularly impressed with Gatekeeper’s eNegotiate feature, which enables fast redlining while working seamlessly with MS Word. This was expected to be critical to the success of the project.
3. Future-proofing the business. Despite the size of the business, the Supply Chain team were still relying in some instances on encrypted spreadsheets and shared drives for vital record-keeping, with compliance documentation being very hard to record and track reliably without the use of a vendor management platform. Gatekeeper would solve this problem, standardise their business processes and scale for the future.
   
   

The Full Story

The key trigger for Manpower UK coming to market for a contract and vendor management platform was reform of legislation in the UK relating to off-payroll working (known in the UK as IR35). This change necessitated a large-scale project at Manpower comprising:

• Due diligence for approximately 700 suppliers
• Sending out new contracts to over 500 suppliers plus ensuing negotiations
• Storing compliance information for all the supply chain
• Building a flexible contract repository able to store multiple types of contract for each supplier

Not only was this project substantial in its scope, it also had a government-imposed deadline of April 2021 that had to be met.

With Gatekeeper already being successfully deployed by Manpower in other European territories, it was the logical solution to use for this task. Colleagues from those European teams gave a strong recommendation for the capabilities of the Gatekeeper solution and team.

Gatekeeper also ticked the boxes for the required functionality from a comprehensive and easy-to-access repository, right through to the crucial online redlining and negotiation feature, known as eNegotiate. This was expected to be critical to the success of the project.

In addition to its suitability for the specific project, Gatekeeper was also deemed to be of strategic importance to the Supply Chain function at Manpower. Traditionally, this area had worked from central spreadsheets and had key documents saved in an unstructured way on local drives.

Furthermore, different parts of the business operated in different ways about their supply chains, with no standardised processes when it came to managing vendors. 

Deploying Gatekeeper would enable the supply chain team to centralise their record-keeping, automate key processes and gain further efficiencies by migrating all teams to Gatekeeper.

Gatekeeper was highly responsive - they realised how important it was for us to have this up and running.” says Sophie Lees, Head of Supply Chain at Manpower UK.As a result of this responsiveness, and the work of the implementation team, Manpower have been able to move all their suppliers into Gatekeeper and are fully prepared for the new legislation, all more than six months before the deadline of April 2021.

They have also been able to achieve the optimisations to their internal processes that they intended:

“We have moved away from multiple storage locations, everything is now centralised via one process and one way of working. We have visibility of our suppliers, multiple workflows to manage multiple variants and have been delighted with how flexible the system has proven to be.” The tight timeline and project scope led the Gatekeeper team to develop new features, ensuring the solution works effectively for Manpower and similar customers.

“By developing close working relationships with our customers, we not only develop a forensic understanding of their current business and the issues they’re looking to solve, but we are also able to work closely to develop the Gatekeeper platform to solve for the supplier and contracting challenges they’ll encounter at their next stage of growth.” says Patrick O’Connor, CEO at GatekeeperFor more information on how Gatekeeper is helping its customers manage their vendors effectively, contact us today.