Picture your company's people. Some are full-time employees on payroll — HR systems like SuccessFactors handle them. But a huge chunk of the work gets done by people who are not employees: contractors, freelancers, consultants, temps from a staffing agency, and outside firms hired to deliver a specific project. That's your external workforce (also called contingent labor).

Here's the problem Fieldglass solves: most companies have no single, clean way to manage all those non-employees. Different managers hire different contractors through different agencies, on different rates, with no central view of who's working, what they cost, or whether they've been offboarded. It's a mess that quietly burns money and creates compliance risk.

SAP Fieldglass is a cloud-based Vendor Management System (VMS) — software that gives a company one central place to find, hire, manage, pay, and offboard its external workforce and outside services. It covers the whole lifecycle: from "we need a contractor" all the way through to the final invoice and offboarding ([SAP](https://www.sap.com/products/hcm/contingent-workforce-management.html)).

Think of it as the "S/4HANA of the temp-and-contractor world." If MM is how you buy materials, Fieldglass is how you buy people's time and services — with the same discipline, approvals, and audit trail.

Why a learner should care: "External workforce" is one of the largest, least-governed spend categories in big companies, and Fieldglass is the market-leading tool for it. Knowing it makes you useful in procurement, HR, and finance conversations at once — which is exactly the kind of cross-functional skill that gets you hired.

Who uses it, and why

• Hiring managers — they need a contractor for a project and want one clean place to request and approve one.
• Procurement / category managers — they want control over external-labor spend, supplier performance, and rate benchmarks.
• HR / total-workforce leaders — they want visibility into everyone doing the work, employees and non-employees together.
• Finance — they want accurate cost tracking, clean invoices, and no "ghost contractors" still billing after a project ended.
• Suppliers / staffing agencies — they log in on the other side to submit candidates, manage their workers, and get paid.

The big win Fieldglass sells is total workforce management: pair the employees in SuccessFactors with the non-employees in Fieldglass and, for the first time, leadership can see the entire workforce in one picture ([SAP PRESS](https://blog.sap-press.com/total-workforce-management-with-sap-fieldglass-sap-successfactors-when-strategy-meets-systems)).