Comparison
Beeline vs Simplify VMS
About Beeline
Arguably the first VMS solution to focus its design exclusively around indirect staffing, Beeline is a recognized name in the VMS world. Taking advantage of its first-to-market lead, Beeline has developed a global footprint serving largely employers with tooling to manage their indirect staffing channels.
Beeline has a reputation as one of the top 5 Vendors Management Systems used for contingent workforce sourcing. Its recent rebranding describes the company as offering extended workforce platform solutions designed to offer the tools businesses need to benefit from new talent sources and new ways of working.
Like most VMS providers, the company initially focused its offer on the needs of procurement teams for indirect staffing, but more recently, Beeline has transitioned its focus toward the HR department, including opportunities to grow talent pools and source talent direct.
Beeline can be described as a first-generation VMS. It was one of the first true Vendor Management Systems created to serve contingent workforce hiring. It brings the benefits of boiler-plated good practice workflows. But, being one of the first players in the market, means Beeline wasn’t born in the cloud-native era. This brings with it architectural limitations to embrace new digital innovations that younger solutions like Simplify VMS are able to bring to market owing to their cloud credentials.
As a mobile-first cloud-native architecture, our customers would argue that Simplify VMS is faster to deploy, easier to configure, and much simpler to integrate with incumbent talent systems.
Strengths
Beeline’s offering ranges broader than some of its larger Gen-1 VMS competitors. Its technology is well proven and arguably covers ‘all the bases’ of external workforce resourcing.
Key areas of its product portfolio include contingent workforce, services procurement, resource tracking, direct sourcing, and high-volume shift-based workforce management.
Weaknesses
While Beeline has worked hard to keep up to date with the latest innovations in the external workforce industry, it has suffered the challenges of already having a very large installed base (and large code base), which has caused the company to struggle to keep up with best practice innovations.
Their efforts have not been helped by the rapid pace of change over the last decade, with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, RPA, etc.
Is Beeline right for you?
Risk averse investors will see Beeline’s decades of deployments as a sign of maturity that’s hard to ignore.
Beeline has worked hard to extend its portfolio into emerging demand areas for technology to support direct sourcing, talent engagement, and resource tracking.
That said, there is always a trade-off between maturity and innovation—Beeline was born pre-cloud and therefore struggles to match the rapid platform improvements, richer integration, simplified mobile-first UI and analytical dynamics of newer cloud-native solutions.
PROS
- A VMS that offers a broad range of capabilities to serve procurement and HR needs
- Large customer base and strong credentials as a VMS supplier
- Global reach and excellent multi-lingual support
- Evidence of delivering large-scale deployments
CONS
- It’s expensive
- Pre-dates cloud-native apps consequently, slow to install, slow on upgrade revisions, not mobile-first, etc.
- Short on AI tooling, and lacking data visualization and reporting
- Customers find it difficult to make changes
Is Simplify right for you?
SimplifyVMS consistently tops the Staffing Industry Analysts chart of Best Vendor Management Systems to buy for the contingent workforce management discipline. As a third-generation digital ecosystem for external workforce management, it serves the needs of all stakeholders who rely on a VMS. including HR, procurement, finance, compliance, staffing vendors, hiring managers, candidates, MSPs with its configurable, cloud-based platform.
