Many master vendor projects struggle with heavy coordination effort, Excel chaos and a lack of transparency – while at the same time clients expect ever more control and real-time reporting. At the STAFFINGpro online conference on 17 March 2026, Pactos founder Antonio Zill showed how AI makes complex large-scale projects more efficient.
When information is scattered, responsibilities are unclear and coordination between the client company, providers and onsite management eats up time, management quickly turns into chaos. The talk was aimed at staffing providers and hirers who want to simplify their master vendor projects , create transparency for clients and clearly differentiate themselves from the competition.
Status quo: everyday life as a master vendor
The talk opened with a look at the typical working day in master vendor projects. Time-consuming manual tasks and unstructured processes still shape it today:
- Excel wallpaper: searching for assignment data, availability and demand in separate lists
- Inbox ping-pong: sorting and prioritizing emails and chats by hand
- Phone cascades: several rounds of coordination for simple clarifications
- Paper mountains: checking and filing onboarding documents, contracts and paperwork manually
- Ad hoc reporting: laboriously pulling data together from different sources
Causes and consequences
Behind this lie four pain points that reinforce each other: the redundancy trap of media breaks and correction loops, data silos with critical dependencies on individuals, the communication dilemma of unstructured coordination channels, and a reporting vacuum in which unverified data leads to inconsistent reports and liability risks in audits.
The structural causes run deeper: there is no central management and data architecture for external workers, the process chain from demand through onboarding to invoicing is not digitally mapped end to end, and KPIs, deadlines and status information are not available in real time.
Master Vendor Management 2.0
The approach: a shared digital platform on which the staffing provider and the client company see the same process – from demand request through matching and assignment to invoicing and reporting. A vendor management system brings all information together in one place, connects the existing systems on both sides such as applicant tracking, ERP and time recording, and delivers KPIs in real time. The master vendor thus turns from a firefighter in day-to-day operations into a strategic partner.
Three practical insights
Antonio Zill showed what this looks like in practice with three use cases from Pactos:
- Smart demand requests: filling requests with the right candidates using AI, checking duplicates and blocklists automatically, involving providers directly – for a shorter time to fill
- Applicant management: all candidate requests and deployed staff in one place, digital signature in the portal, customizable checklists for onboarding and offboarding
- Invoice verification: uploading invoices, checking them via individual approval flows and automatically detecting errors such as wrong amounts, duplicate invoices or format errors
„Less Excel. Less coordination chaos. More control.“ Antonio Zill · co-founder & managing director, Pactos
Further reading
The detailed summary of the talk with the most frequent questions from the follow-up discussion is available as a webinar recap.
Pactos thanks STAFFINGpro for the invitation and all participants for the exchange afterwards.