Managed Services vs. Interim Staffing

“Outsourcing” can take many forms. Interim staffing, or staff augmentation, has long been an option that companies have used to fill unanticipated vacancies or temporary needs for additional resources. Once used mainly to fill lower-level manufacturing and administrative/clerical jobs, interim staffing ultimately moved up-market to meet the demand for temporary accounting professionals and even interim controllers and CFOs (for positions at levels such as controller and CFO, interim staffing is generally referred to as “interim management”). Interim staffing generally involves a company temporarily filling one or more positions with people provided by an interim staffing firm, with the company’s managers supervising the temporary staff just as they would supervise internal employees. Managed services, in contrast, is a form of outsourcing whereby an entire function or process is managed and delivered by a third-party firm. Outsourcing payroll processing to a third-party payroll services provider is an example of managed services, whereas hiring a temporary payroll clerk reporting to an internal payroll supervisor would be an example of interim staffing.

Managed services has its origins in the shared services concept, which began in larger companies with multiple business units and/or facilities. The idea of shared services was to reduce the cost of a company-wide function, such as accounting and financial management, by taking it out of each individual division or location. By eliminating redundancies and creating one centralized hub, or shared service center, to fulfill that function for all units of the company, economies of scale were achieved and common costs were defrayed among multiple entities or sites. The next phase in the evolution of this concept was to outsource shared services to a third party; in some cases companies actually spun off their own shared service centers as independent entities. Even greater economies of scale were realized, as these third-party shared service centers now served multiple organizations, allowing costs to be further leveraged across numerous companies.

Although many such outsourcing firms are located offshore, bringing favorable labor rates into the mix, it should be noted that labor arbitrage is not the only benefit and is in fact becoming less important as labor rates increase in places like China and India. Outsourcing need not be, and is not, synonymous with offshoring. The benefits of outsourcing, even to US-based managed services firms, include cost sharing, turnkey infrastructure, best practices, continual process and system innovation, scalability, redeployment of internal resources away from non-core activities, and access to superior talent that has a career path at the outsourcing firm that they might not otherwise have in a non-core internal function. (Please see my earlier post, The Value Proposition of Finance and Accounting Outsourcing).

Outsourced shared services, or managed services, have been used by the Fortune 1000 for years, but the trend is still taking hold in middle market and emerging growth companies. While these smaller companies are familiar with outsourcing payroll, IT, and certain other areas, outsourcing entire functions such as accounting and financial management, or human resources, is still an emerging trend. Many middle-market and emerging growth companies have only one business unit or location, so setting up their own internal shared service centers is not a meaningful alternative. But outsourcing functions to a third-party managed services provider enables them to avail themselves of the same advantages as the Fortune 1000.

While both interim staffing and managed services can be viable alternatives depending upon what the client company’s management wants to accomplish, they are very different solutions:

• Managed services provides a complete turnkey solution that is managed by the outsourcing firm, whereas interim staffing fills individual positions that are still supervised by the company’s internal managers.
• Managed services are delivered with a cohesive infrastructure of people, systems and processes that represent best practices, whereas interim staffing relies on the company’s existing infrastructure and each temporary employee may have his or her own way of doing things.
• A managed services provider is accountable for all deliverables and quality control, whereas interim staff are accountable only to follow the direction of the company’s internal management.
• A managed services provider brings proprietary intellectual property to bear in its services, while an interim staffing firm is generally offering only resources to work within the company, without proprietary intellectual property.
• A managed services relationship can be consultative and collaborative, and sets direction for continuous improvement in the particular functional area. Interim staffing simply fills a specific need as defined by the company, and generally lacks the consultative/collaborative aspect.
• Managed services can reduce expense by the sharing of resources and costs across multiple client companies (economies of scale). In contrast, interim staffing will generally cost more for a given position than internal hiring, and is typically only of value when the need is short term and the company wants to avoid a full-time, permanent hire. Which leads to the next distinction…
• Managed services can be a permanent solution that can supplant both part-time or full-time internal positions, whereas interim staffing generally makes sense only for temporary situations.
• Managed services employees are already working together effectively as a team within the culture of the provider firm and have a pride in their “brand”. In contrast, interim staffing resources must fit into a client company’s corporate culture, be able to gel with the team they are placed on, have to navigate internal company politics, and generally do not even have much of a shared identity, collegiality or loyalty back to the interim staffing firm that employs them, let alone to the client company that is using them temporarily.
• Managed services providers can attract superior talent, because they are part of what is “core” to the managed services firm and have a distinct career path that may not exist at a staff augmentation firm, where they may be doing interim work only as a stop-gap between full-time jobs or even winding down their careers.
• Managed services firms have an internal commitment to continuing education in order to remain leaders in their functional realms. In some but not all cases, this may be lacking at interim staffing firms, as the necessary skills vary from project to project and their objective is simply to have a stable of people with a variety of skills. Client companies may have to train temporary staff themselves.

As the above points illustrate, there are many advantages to managed services. This does not mean, however, that there are no advantages to interim staffing. As Alsbridge, Inc. notes in a white paper, staff augmentation offers greater control, less risk, and less onerous contract requirements. Interim staffing can be a particularly good solution in certain situations, for example when very specialized individuals are needed to fulfill a defined short term role, or when unskilled labor is needed. Alsbridge further suggests that a hybrid approach, involving both managed services and interim staffing, might be the ideal approach for certain companies, especially as needs are addressed across multiple functions and processes.