CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with another assortment of supply management technology 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!

Determine Refreshes Cloud Platform for 2018

Last week, Determine, Inc. (NASDAQ: DTRM), the Indiana-based provider of contract management and source-to-settle solutions for the cloud, announced a product refresh for nearly all of the Determine Cloud Platform. It follows a briefing that Ardent analysts took with the Determine team a couple of weeks ago and our subsequent recap and analysis of what they’ve been up to and what they have planned for 2018.

Starting with the Determine Core, the team has made advances to the user interface (UI) by providing process hierarchies based on individual workflows and in turn, improving the user experience (UX). The Core’s color palette was also enhanced to accommodate people with color blindness and is now Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant. Individual applications that have been refreshed are: Sourcing, Supplier Management, Contract Management, and Procurement. It can now convert a new sourcing event into a new contract and integrate terms, conditions, counter-parties, and other information into the contract. It adds greater supplier performance management capabilities, like an automatic questionnaire and evaluation scoring based on configurable rules; it also adds supplier certification tags, enabling users to quickly identify which suppliers have been certified for which category.

The refresh boosts Contract Management capabilities, including: dynamic contract templates for easy customization; enhanced authoring and redlining, empowering non-legal users to contribute to the review and editing process while clearly establishing and maintaining internal oversight; and a new Signer Role functionality that allows for additional as well as automated e-Signature. Lastly, Procurement adds a Catalog Version Management system that enables a faster and less data-intensive update of existing items by pulling item images from a shared catalog inventory. It also enables managers to refresh catalogs either manually or by importing new catalogs. And a pair of updates to eCommerce include a slider bar that allows users to see differences across similar products, and a spend tracking feature that enables users to see realized (or missed) savings within line items to enhance overall spend management.

Coupa Announces R20, its Latest Spend Management Platform Refresh

Also last week, Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a San Francisco-based spend management solutions provider, informed us that it has issued R20 (Release 20) of its cloud-based business spend management platform. R20 is a multi-faceted product update that leverages the power of the Coupa network, including its customers, suppliers, and their data, that can provide greater intelligence, visibility agility, and performance to their customer base across a variety of spend categories. Front and center of the refresh is the addition of Community Intelligence, or the ability of users to leverage the supplier data of the entire Coupa network, including transactional spend data, which can help buyers and sourcing teams “color” suppliers on what they lack in sufficient information to make educated sourcing decisions. Procurement teams can effectively lower or mitigate supply risk by leveraging Coupa’s community of users.

Another new application is Services Maestro, which is meant to aid services / complex spend management and drive compliance to contracts, service-level agreements, business travel policies, and more. A final new application, Coupa Accelerate, can help buyers take advantage of early-payment discounts from suppliers that are on the Coupa platform and that have established criteria, communication channels, and payment methods upfront. There are reportedly 50 additional platform updates, covering governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC), transactional enhancements, and improvements to the business travel approval process.

Jaggaer Announces Strong Financial Performance Results for 2017

In other news, JAGGAER, the North Carolina-based source-to-settle solutions provider formerly known as SciQuest, announced strong financial performance results for calendar year 2017 — the strongest in the company’s 22 years (in all its incarnations). Details were light, but according to Jaggaer officials, the company racked up its highest revenues on record and finished the year with more than 150 new customers. It also expanded into new markets and reported having more than 600 customers in total. Jaggaer capped a year in which it had acquired two companies — BravoSolution and Pool4Tool — and continued to consolidate itself as a market leader in source-to-settle solution suites.

New “Frontiers” for Tradeshift, All Roads Lead to Innovation

Exciting news coming out of Davos, Switzerland: Tradeshift, the California-based provider of supplier collaboration networks, announced the launch of a new product innovation lab and incubator, “Frontiers,” with the goal of driving supply chain innovation. Tradeshift executives shared that the goal of Frontiers is to research, develop, and eventually integrate Industry / Procurement 4.0 technologies, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain distributed digital ledgers, and Connected Devices / the Internet of Things (IoT) with the Tradeshift network. And the goal of this R&D and integration work is to drive transparency, sustainability, and risk management into global supply chain management using a variety of use cases for these technologies. Tradeshift has been getting into Industry / Procurement 4.0 innovation for a couple of years now, first when it acquired and integrated a smart / intelligent travel booking solution, Hyper, and then when it joined the Hyperledger Blockchain consortium as a governing member. In the coming months, look for Tradeshift to field beta versions of applications that will seek to test various use cases, including supply chain financing and transparency efforts.

PROACTIS Files Tender Offer for Hubwoo

Last month, PROACTIS Holdings, the UK-based provider of spend management and eProcurement solutions for the cloud, formally filed a tender offer through its subsidiary, Perfect Commerce S.A., for the remaining 79% of Hubwoo, itself a subsidiary of Perfect Commerce S.A., for €.20 per Hubwoo share. Documentation for the tender offer ought to have published on February 7, but details are still forthcoming. Upon publishing, the tender offer will be open to Hubwoo shareholders for ten trading days between February 8 and February 21, with the final results expected to be announced by the end of February.

Procurify Integrates Netsuite for Greater Spend Management

British Columbia-based Procurify, which provides an automated procure-to-pay solution for the cloud, announced that it has integrated with Netsuite, a San Mateo, California-based provided of cloud-based ERP software. Integrating Procurify’s cloud-based P2P software with Netsuite’s cloud-based ERP software can provide line-of-business users in the typical enterprise with the ability to make smart, thoughtful purchasing decisions while having visibility into the finer points of procurement. The idea behind the integration is that by giving the line-of-business the power to make independent purchases, they will eventually develop a mindset of finding the best value for the enterprise and make smarter purchases without higher-level direction or intervention.

ESM Solutions Releases Financial Performance Results for 2017

Finally, ESM Solutions, the Pennsylvania-based company that provides SaaS-based spend management, sourcing, and procurement solutions, announced financial and operational performance results for calendar year 2017. Detailed numbers of ESM’s year were scant. But according to company officials, ESM had a really good 2017, with reportedly record-breaking growth and revenue; high customer retention and deployment (doubling from 2016); and double-digit growth in transactional volume on its spend management suite. They also reported new or strengthened partnerships, like its partnership with Paymerang (click to read our prior coverage); new “upstream” and “downstream” solutions and tools; and a push into new markets abroad, particularly the Middle East. With the increased hiring they began to expand their infrastructure in anticipation of further solution development, customer growth, and business success in 2018.

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