A sneak peek into Utmost ‘Contract Hub,’ a single place to store ALL external workforce contracts

Utmost is a single source of truth for the external workforce, and as such, we believe any contracts associated with the work being done need to be easily relatable to those doing the work. Contracts can come in several forms or types, like Master Service Agreement (MSA), Statement of Work (SOW) or Independent Contractor Agreement (ICA) defining the relationship between two parties. This is where Contract Hub was born.

Contract objects sit on ‘top’ of worker engagements and can be nested (e.g. SOW rolls up to an MSA, the supplier MSA can sit under the MSP MSA). In Contract Hub, enterprise users will be able to see all key data and transactions associated with a contract such as: the status and timeline, Budget vs Actuals, all associated worker engagements, milestone progression, and collaboration between the enterprise and supplier.

Contract Hub allows all non-employee workers and contracts to be located in one place, furthering the ability for companies to answer: 

• • Who am I engaged with?
  • What work are they doing and for who?
  • How much am I spending with them?

Here are some key differentiators from other contract and Vendor Management Solutions:

• • Single module - Other solutions have separate modules, often with different data sets and workers in different tables, making it hard to check misclassification and to track workers across engagements
  • More than SOWs - Solutions only focused on SOW-based agreements miss out on other ways of engaging like gig work, independent contractor assignments, MSAs, and subcontracting agreements
  • Flexibility - We focus on the contract object, so actions like assigning business rules, moving to another manager or business unit, and enforcing different payment terms is easy
  • Ease of use - Manually or bulk-add contract data into Utmost. Enterprises can also source and negotiate a contract agreement within the system directly
  • Supplier friendly - On the supplier’s profile, a new sub-tab showing all contracts associated with that specific supplier will be available, making it easier for them to track projects

Like the rest of Utmost, our Contract Hub is built with an Open API architecture, which enables us to import or export contracts from or to another system (i.e. a CLM, P2P, etc.) via integration or through the UI via our DocYard functionality. Whether it’s a one time load during implementation to take all of those contracts out of drawers or the need to synchronize with your enterprise contract repository, we make it easy for Utmost to be the system of record for external workforce contracts.

Contract Hub is built in the same manner as our Fields, Forms, and Flows – highly configurable, editable, and can be added to our UI in a self-service manner. This means users and workers can easily interact with any Utmost object (i.e., Worker, Engagement, MSA, SOW, milestone, Freelance/IC Agreement) without requiring any custom coding. Managers can easily tailor their appearance and behavior as required. Any contract is configurable to anyone with access, and they become available as soon as a person hits “publish,” with no code push or delays.

This configurability is a major differentiator over traditional VMSs where there is limited flexibility on what users can change or update in the system.

Contracts will have their own budgets and spend directly against them (e.g., milestones on an SOW contract). All engagements will have a governing contract (MSA, SOW, etc.) and they will be selectable when creating the engagement. If only one contract exists between the enterprise and supplier when creating an engagement, it will default. If multiple contracts exist, there is a drop down for the user to select the appropriate contract of the multiple. 

This, along with many other exciting features, will continue to expand Utmost’s functionality and ensure all workers are tracked, engaged, managed, and paid in one single module.

If you want to see a sneak peek of Contract Hub, please join us on Thursday, July 14 at 8am PT | 11am ET for our Q2 release webinar.