SAP Fieldglass is a Vendor Management System (VMS) designed to solve core challenges in managing an external workforce. A primary driver for its implementation is fragmented labor management, where organizations lack a unified view of their contingent workers and service providers, leading to inefficiency, risk, and uncontrolled spending. Another significant challenge is a time-consuming onboarding process for these external workers. Without a centralized system, processes for provisioning access, assets, and completing necessary paperwork are often manual, inconsistent, and slow. SAP Fieldglass directly addresses these issues by providing a single, cloud-based platform to automate and standardize the entire lifecycle of external talent, from sourcing and onboarding to invoicing and offboarding.

B. Workforce payments: SAP Fieldglass facilitates invoice approval and provides data for payment, but the actual fund disbursement is typically executed by the client's core ERP or Accounts Payable system.

D. Data privacy regulation issues: While SAP Fieldglass supports compliance with data privacy regulations, this is a feature and benefit rather than a primary business problem that exclusively drives its initial implementation.

1. SAP Official Documentation: In the "SAP Fieldglass Services and External Workforce" solution brief, SAP highlights key customer challenges that the solution addresses. It explicitly mentions the need to "gain full visibility into your external workforce and services" to overcome fragmented management and to "standardize and automate processes from requisition to payment," which includes streamlining onboarding.

Source: SAP Solution Brief, "Services Procurement and External Workforce Management with SAP Fieldglass solutions," Page 3, "Business Challenges" section.

2. SAP Official Documentation: The SAP Fieldglass product page on SAP.com emphasizes its role in solving process inefficiencies. It states that the solution helps to "Onboard and offboard workers quickly and efficiently" and "Gain complete visibility and control over your external workforce." These points directly correspond to the challenges of time-consuming onboarding and fragmented labor management.

Source: SAP.com, "SAP Fieldglass External Talent Management" product description, "Benefits" section.

3. University Courseware Context: In courses on modern Human Capital Management (HCM) and Strategic Sourcing, Vendor Management Systems (VMS) are presented as solutions to the operational and strategic risks of decentralized external workforce management. The lack of a single system of record (fragmentation) and inefficient procure-to-pay cycles (which include onboarding) are cited as primary business drivers for VMS adoption.

Source: Aligned with principles taught in supply chain and HCM courses, such as those available through MIT OpenCourseWare on supply chain management, which discuss the need for visibility and process control in procurement. (e.g., MIT OCW, 15.762, Supply Chain Planning).