CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with another assortment of contingent workforce management (CWM) solution-provider news and updates from the past month to share with our community. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you have news to share with us, please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!

DCR Workforce Launches Mid-Market Extended Workforce Management Tool

Earlier this month, DCR Workforce, a Florida-based Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Vendor Management Systems (VMS) solution developer, announced that it has launched Smart Track NOW, an “out of the box” VMS tool intended to help mid-market companies better manage their extended workforce. Smart Track NOW is marketed as a scalable, user-friendly VMS tool that can enable mid-sized companies to quickly deploy (in a week’s time) a workforce management solution that can allow them to pull more indirect categories of spend under management, thereby reducing financial and regulatory risks, drive compliance, and deliver more savings on indirect spend. It is also marketed as a flexible solution that can scale and adapt as companies grow and their needs change.

SAP Fieldglass Adopts Machine Learning for Workforce Simulation

SAP Fieldglass, the Chicago-based provider of cloud-based complex spend management solutions, announced last week the release of Live Insights, a data-driven, machine learning-enabled workforce analytics tool that enables enterprises to benchmark their current workforce, simulate future scenarios, predict future needs, and plan for the future. Live Insights is powered by SAP HANA and leverages the analytics platform to aggregate, normalize, anonymize, and analyze enterprise, supplier, and third-party data to produce predictive insights. As a result, enterprises can quickly understand what their future external worker needs will be in a particular labor category, region, etc., as well as what the rates would be. It will also allow them to directly requisition certain categories of workers for certain projects along defined timelines, and what the ideal times would be.

Beeline Deploys Virtual Assistant for Sourcing External Talent

Beeline, the Florida-based provider of VMS solutions for the contingent/external workforce, has announced the deployment of what could be the workforce management industry’s first virtual assistant (or “bot”) for helping sourcing, procurement, and HR teams find external talent. Beeline Assistant leverages a combination of Beeline’s VMS solution, instant messaging tools like Skype and Slack, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) tool called Automated Talent Ontology Machine (ATOM) to field user requests, learn user patterns, adjust, and assist the end user. Outputs can be quick answers to questions, longer synopses, and it can even help end users find and source talent. It is also supported by a dedicated AI team and is available 24/7. Beeline will officially introduce and demonstrate Beeline Assistant at the 2017 Beeline + IQN Conference in early May. [Side note: if you’re attending, look for Ardent Partner’s Research Director and Vice President of Operations, Christopher Dwyer!]

Harvest Partners and Investcorp Recapitalize PRO Unlimited

In case you missed it, Harvest Partners, a private-equity firm, and Investcorp, and investment manager, announced that they have recapitalized PRO Unlimited, the San Francisco-based MSP and VMS solution provider, for an undisclosed sum, as financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. As part of the deal, Investcorp will reinvest in PRO Unlimited and take a minority stake in the new financial structure. As a result of the new investment, PRO Unlimited is expected to continue developing and expanding MSP and VMS solutions and expanding into more markets and industry verticals.

Empower VMS Re-Brands as UpGlide

Last week, Michigan-based Empower VMS, a cloud-based VMS solution provider, announced that it has re-branded as and changed its name to UpGlide to reflect the ease of taking contingent workforce management functions and applications to the cloud. Users are said to be able to have access to more feature functionality, and faster, via UpGlide in the form of MSPs and VMS solutions, enabling companies of all sizes to access these applications when and where they need them in a simple and efficient manner.

WorkMarket Partners with Accenture, Receives $25 Million Investment

On Tuesday of this week, WorkMarket, an online Freelancer Management System (FMS) vendor, announced that it has received a $25 million investment from Accenture, a management consulting firm and technology systems integrator, and The Foundry Group, a venture capital firm. The partnership was also announced on WorkMarket’s blog by Stephen DeWitt, WorkMarket’s CEO, and framed as a joint effort to drive agility throughout the total workforce by providing enterprises of all sizes with an accessible, on-demand platform to recruit and source all kinds of external workers that the enterprise may need. As part of this partnership, Accenture will also integrate WorkMarket’s FMS solution within its own “Cloud First Applications Team” that delivers “pure play” technology solutions.

Post Script: Are you free today at 2 PM EST? Ardent Partners’ Chief Research Officer, Andrew Bartolini, will deliver a free, half-hour webinar previewing the results from his annual benchmark research report, CPO Rising 2017: The Tools of the Trade. It’s free to attend. Simply click this link to register!

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