Today, we continue with Part Two of our focus on Hubwoo, the supply management solution provider and operator of one of the world’s largest business (or B2B or supplier) networks with a review of the recent upgrade and re-launch of the its network, “The Business Network.” Part One is here.

As a reminder, this “Provider Profile” series is a sneak preview of the kind of supply management technology market coverage you will start seeing on CPO Rising in 2013. Click to learn more about our plans for CPO Rising in 2013 and click to learn more about Ardent Partners’ plans for 2013.

Hubwoo recently announced a series of features and enhancements to its network, “The Business Network” and in a series of briefings with Ardent Partners shared more details on the announcement and its vision for what it calls a ‘next generation business process collaboration network.” Readers who are interested in learning more about Hubwoo should read this article first.

The News:

As part of its aggressive transition away from a long-time go-to-market partnership with SAP, Hubwoo recently announced a series of new features and enhancements to its business network that it believes will help accelerate the network’s transformation from one that primarily supported B2B transactions to one that supports key collaborative activities between different enterprises or trading partners (i.e. buyers and sellers). The network upgrade adds several new enhancements to the existing Hubwoo network including:

• A new Hubwoo service that enables buyers to provide invoice and payment status to all of its suppliers via the network
• A “vendor master sync” feature which allows buy-side customers to take all or part of the vendor master (procurement or accounts payable) and push it out onto the network for suppliers to self-manage.
• As part of Hubwoo’s new sell smarter business process offering, sellers are now able to advertise on the network leveraging “context sensitive” search capabilities (like geography and category).
• Hubwoo also enables all sellers to publish a public catalog of their goods and services. The catalog is currently associated with their network profile

Hubwoo’s View:

While it recently renewed its BPO agreement with SAP to resell SAP’s procurement solutions in the cloud for another three years, Hubwoo is now laser focused on its largest asset, “The Business Network.”

Hubwoo believes that it can layer in intelligent features and value-added services (like those announced above and the “Smarter” offerings below) to drive greater collaboration and value to all of its network participants. The first step in its strategy was to increase the size of the network by building upon its large, active and organically-grown supply base and more than triple that number via a partnership with D&B that has resulted in the network having more than 1 million registered businesses. Hubwoo has also been very active on the partnership front to find other eProcurement and ERP providers with customers that could gain great value by leveraging the Hubwoo network. Finally, Hubwoo plans to continue to drive organic network growth through its general pursuit of customers (both SAP and non-SAP back-end) and its commitment to its buy-side customers to enable 100% of their suppliers.

Next, Hubwoo is focused on delivering those features and services to the two constituencies that comprise the network: buyers and sellers. Hubwoo markets a collection of solutions and services to the buy-side as Source Smarter, Buy Smarter, and Pay Smarter. A few highlights from those offerings are below:

• Source Smarter: In the near-term, Hubwoo plans to offer free public tendering functionality and integrate the sourcing activity from several sourcing marketplaces into its network
• Buy Smarter: Beyond its collaborative catalog management capabilities, Hubwoo currently leverages an IT partnership to deliver a front-end skin that can sit on top of (or bypass) SAP’s SRM or MM solutions to provide what it believes is a more usable and consumer-like eProcurement solution that links to the Hubwoo network
• Pay Smarter: Hubwoo offers rules-based workflow on the supplier’s invoice creation and delivery side that is designed to reduce and/or eliminate invoicing errors before they occur

With one million registered suppliers, Hubwoo has begun to target, for the first time, suppliers as potential customers (Hubwoo’s network model charges the buyers a fee for usage and does not charge supplier transaction fees unless the buyer, at its option, wants to share its costs with its supply chain). Hubwoo markets a collection of value-added services and capabilities to the sell-side as Market Smarter, Sell  Smarter, and Invoice Smarter. A few highlights from those offerings are below:

• Market Smarter: Hubwoo has developed and plans to develop paid marketing and advertising opportunities that revolve around network search and public tendering
• Sell Smarter: Beyond its collaborative catalog management capabilities, Hubwoo’s public catalog functionality allows suppliers to sell their goods and services across the network to buyers and other sellers via a traditional PO generation process
• Invoice Smarter: Hubwoo’s supplier invoice capability includes a series of rules established by the buyer and a match and approve functionality that stops invoices with errors or those that fail to meet certain rules or thresholds from being generated and sent (Hubwoo’s invoicing capabilities will be covered in more detail in a future article on our sister site, Payables Place)

We will conclude this series on next time with our analysis of Hubwoo’s announcement and general strategy.

Tagged in: Ardent Partners Research, Networks, Solution Providers, Source-to-Settle