Convincing your organization to incorporate on-demand labor into your talent strategy will yield long-term benefits, including reduced costs, increased revenue, and improved customer service. And creating a business case will clarify your expectations and demonstrate the value you expect to achieve.

We’ve taken the guesswork out of how to build a business case for on-demand labor with five essential steps to prepare your business for on-demand labor. Ready to start building your business case? Get the guide or reach out to our team to get started.

• What common business problems that enterprise organizations can address with on-demand labor, including costs, revenue, capacity, and utilization.
• How to engage stakeholders, including the executive/C-suite leader, service leader, and operations manager. In general, these stakeholders care about achieving results.
• How to assess your current state and analyze the financial impact of on-demand labor.

Adopting an on-demand labor platform isn’t a typical software purchase. It requires a transformational shift that a champion will need to lead, and stakeholders across the company will need to support. Convincing your organization to incorporate on-demand labor into your talent strategy will yield long-term benefits, including reduced costs, increased revenue, and improved customer service. And creating a business case will clarify your expectations and demonstrate the value you expect to achieve. We’ve taken the guesswork out of how to build a business case for on-demand
labor with a five-step plan for putting one together.

Identify your primary business objective

A clearly articulated business case begins with identifying the top business outcome you want to achieve or problem you need to solve. Even if you don’t yet know what specific outcome you want to accomplish, understanding your business problems provides the justification for starting the project. For example, do you have issues with quality, coverage, or cost?

Common business problems that enterprise organizations want to address:

Costs: reducing labor costs, whether using employees or third-party subcontractors

Revenue: competitively pricing new deals and generating more top-line revenue by improving win rates and/or expanding into new types of work

Capacity: more easily responding to spikes in demand or obligations in uncovered geographies

Employee utilization: optimizing employee utilization by using on-demand talent to augment existing staff or capabilities

Engage stakeholders

Getting stakeholder buy-in is essential to successfully adding on-demand talent to your labor mix. You will need support and engagement from several stakeholders within the service delivery value chain, including the executive/C-suite leader, service leader, and operations manager. In general, these stakeholders care about achieving results.

Stakeholders outside the service delivery value chain—including legal, HR, finance, procurement, and IT—care about risk and compliance. You will need to ensure they are aligned with the purpose of the program and buy into the intended outcomes.

Stakeholders within the service delivery value chain, who must all say “yes”:

Service leader (this leader also oversees operations, and is likely you)

What they care about: Platform ease of use, technician quality, and cost savings.
What questions they’ll have: How will we ensure the quality of platform labor is as good as full-time employees? How much money will we save?
When to bring them in: Beginning of the on-demand labor evaluation process. They will typically be the first buyer persona to be engaged.

C-Suite / Executive

What they care about: Protecting margins and maximizing profitability.
What questions they’ll have: How will on-demand labor help me save money? How will it help me grow my top line?
When to bring them in: Beginning of the process after the first use case is identified.

Sales and solutioning

What they care about: Increased revenue, improved win rates, and empirical pricing data.
What questions they’ll have: How does the platform provide data that will enable us to be more competitive? How difficult is incorporating the pricing data into our solutioning process?
When to bring them in: Toward the end of the process. They can provide additional organizational leverage if you’re having challenges getting the agreement approved.

Stakeholders outside the service delivery value chain, who can’t say “yes” but can say “no”:

Procurement/sourcing

What they care about: Saving money and compliance with existing sourcing processes (e.g., fitting into
current contractual structures).
What questions they’ll have: How will platform labor save money? Which type of contractual structure/ process does this fit in?
When to bring them in: Beginning of the process after the first use case is identified. They can prevent or help navigate internal roadblocks if involved in the entire process.

HR

What they care about: Compliance with existing HR processes and the required transformation to use platform labor.
What questions they’ll have: How does using platform labor differ from working with full-time employees? Who will be vetting the on-demand talent, and how?
When to bring them in: Toward the end of the process.

Finance

What they care about: Potential savings, potential top-line growth, and financial contract terms.
What questions they’ll have: How will the platform help us save money? How will it help grow the top line? How does the platform work within existing financial benchmarks? Can we use our payment terms?
When to bring them in: Toward the end of the process.

Security/risk

What they care about: Security, privacy, and risk.
What questions they’ll have: Does the platform expose my company to any organizational or IT risk? What existing systems will the platform integrate with and how is data shared?
When to bring them in: Toward the end of the process.

Legal

What they care about: Risk, contract terms and conditions.
What questions they’ll have: How well does the platform fit with existing contract structures? How difficult will it be to get the Field Nation to agree to standard contract terms and conditions?
When to bring them in: Beginning of the process after the first use case is identified.

The importance of the executive sponsor

The executive sponsor is likely a senior executive in the service delivery organization. This leader provides the authority and credibility needed for an impactful launch and long-term success with
on-demand labor. They must have stated business objectives at a high enough level to justify the required effort of the stakeholders and drive the required organizational transformation. In organizations that have successfully deployed on-demand labor, the executive sponsor demonstrates their personal commitment, as well as the organization’s commitment to change.

Assess your current state

To figure out where you want to go, you first have to establish where you are. Tap into your service delivery stakeholders for the necessary information to develop the best possible understanding of the current state of your service operation. This requires visibility into objective data, including headcount, current spend, utilization rates, response times, first-time fix rate, and business rules and processes.

You will need to know things like:

• Number and types of field service workers (employees and subcontractors)
• Work order/ticket volume and cost by work type (e.g. projects versus installs versus maintenance)
• # of work orders completed by employees versus subcontractors
• Current dispatch costs
• Current travel time
• Average time per work order
• Average revenue per employee per day
• Average employee utilization rates
• First-time fix rates
• And other data specific to your organization

Analyze the financial impact of on-demand labor

To strengthen your business case, you need to quantify the financial impact of incorporating on-demand labor into your service delivery strategy. We will use your team’s data about work volumes and costs from step 3 to prepare a detailed Business Impact Analysis (BIA) that will show:

• Your average cost per work order per work category (including subcontractors)
• Expected savings from using on-demand labor
• A recommended approach for the initial work to shift to the on-demand platform

Build and communicate your case

Using the findings from your internal assessment and the Business Impact Analysis, circle back with your stakeholders and present:

• A summary of the problem
• The proposed solution and the associated ROI
• The opportunity cost of NOT investing in the on-demand labor platform
• The costs/risks
• How this solution will meet the stated business objectives

Ideally, you’ll want to hold a kick-off meeting with all stakeholders to make them aware of the upcoming project, and gain their input and alignment to the stated project outcomes or problems to be solved.

After the kickoff meeting, set up an ongoing meeting to keep stakeholders informed about the progress of the project, and additional meetings as needed to gain input and provide feedback. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization, these ongoing sessions could include workshops, interviews, and surveys.

Frequent and ongoing communications allow you to keep stakeholders informed, learn of any objections, and allocate time to address concerns. Skipping this step can delay your project’s start and
slow your adoption of on-demand labor.