CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with 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!

JAGGAER Partners with iTizziMO on Application Integration, is now ISO 37001 Compliant

JAGGAER, the North Carolina-based provider of source-to-settle solutions, made a pair of announcements over the past couple of weeks. First, it announced that is has partnered with iTizziMO, a Germany-based digital transformation solution provider, to integrate iTizziMO’s platform, Simplifier, to Jaggaer’s suite in an effort to expand the number of applications and products available through the Jaggaer suite. Simplified enables organizations to integrate custom/in-house applications onto not just Jaggaer’s suite, but other source-to-settle suites, like those from SAP Ariba. It will also enable enterprise procurement teams to map these applications to existing processes. The first application to be made available via this strategic partnership is a mobile application to drive audit management that will be presented at Rev2018 in Munich, on June 25th of 26th of this year.

In a separate announcement made earlier this week, Jaggaer informed customers that it is now ISO 37001 (Anti-bribery Management System) compliant, bringing the number of ISO certifications that Jaggaer has to six.

Basware Augments UX with Intelligent Personal Assistant for Procurement

Basware, the financial supply chain provider, headquartered in Finland, announced at the IOFM’s AP and P2P Conference and Expo earlier this month that it has gone to market with a virtual/personal procurement assistant. Comprised of “artificial intelligence,” a chat bot, and natural language processing (NLP), “Basware Assistant” is intended to augment the user experience (UX) by enabling users to break through Basware’s eProcurement user interface (UI) to retrieve documents and information, like purchase orders and requisitions, from across the P2P process. Basware officials remarked that the best UI is no UI, and so any feature that helps users more seamlessly interact with the Basware platform ought to increase efficiencies, decrease the time it takes to find the desired data point or document, and increase the overall UX.

Source-to-Settle Solution Provider, Flucticiel, Rebrands as Fluxym

Early last week, Montreal-based Source-to-Settle solution provider, Flucticiel, informed us that it has rebranded as Fluxym. In a statement also posted here, Thierry Jaffry, Vice President of Operations, assured readers that all contracts under Flucticiel will be honored through Fluxym and that only the name is changing. As discussed here, the rebranded name, Fluxym, stems from the Latin word, fluxum, meaning movement and fluidity. It is meant to signify Fluxym’s approach to the source-to-settle process and pay homage to the company’s 16-year legacy in the space. This year, in parallel with the name and logo change, Fluxym looks to to continue to grow staff headcount by 25% as it works to integrate other cloud-based solutions, like Basware and Ivalua, within its platform and reach more of the North American and European markets.

Exari Updates Enterprise Contract Management Platform

In other news, Exari, a Boston-based provider of cloud-based contract management solutions, announced that it has updated its enterprise contract life cycle management platform, Exari Contracts. Release 7.4, which is available immediately, features several new capabilities, such as an AI-integrated data extraction tool that enables users to drag and drop digital contracts into the system, which then, with the help of OCR technology, deconstructs and then extracts data points from the contract, cleans, classifies, and associates the contract data with the correct master service agreement. When creating and signing new contracts, users now have the ability to see redlines and changes in contract versions up through review and signature and compare them the latest and final authorized version. Finally, non-legal users can draft contracts anywhere and at any time using pre-defined contract templates.

Icertis Introduces Two AI-Powered Contract Management Apps

Another contract management solution provider, Icertis, makes the news today. The Seattle, Washington-based SaaS provider announced last week that it has introduced two AI-powered contract management applications for its Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform: ICM DigitizeAI and ICM DiscoverAI. This news follows a $50 million investment the company secured in February of 2018 partially earmarked to further develop and integrate AI capabilities within the ICM platform.

On the heals of and likely due to this funding, Icertis worked into integrate several brand-name cognitive capabilities, like Azure Machine Learning Package for Text Analytic, Bing Entity Search API, and Translator Text API, to boost ICM’s capabilities. These advancements will now enable ICM users to import legacy contracts, extract contract terms and clauses, and map them to “semantic definitions” produced by ICM DigitizeAI. In doing so, it will enable users to deconstruct their contracts and be able to search them using operative terms, thus decreasing search and retrieval times, which could lead to a host of business benefits. Likewise, ICM DiscoverAI enables users to pull in third-party (supplier) contracts and do the same, aiding contract search, discovery, and analysis. These capabilities extend to Microsoft Word and enable users to use Word-based contracts.

With Machine Learning, Kinaxis Launches “Self-Healing Supply Chain”

And in a final bit of news, Kinaxis, the Ottawa-based provider of supply chain management and sales and operations planning solutions, announced the launch of a machine learning-enabled supply management solution it is calling “Self-Healing Supply Chain.” The solution is part of Kinaxis RapidResponse, and aims to autonomously and continuously correct assumptions made during the product design and planning stage and final production and assembly stages (what they call “as designed” and “as demonstrated” performance). If projected times are off on any of these facets of product development, then it could have disastrous consequences for an enterprise.

Self-Healing Supply Chain aims to continuously examine billions of disparate data points and predict with increasingly better accuracy more realistic design and production stages. It will alert users if there are “high-impact exceptions” between a supply chain’s designed and actual performance. It will also measure and demonstrate for users the project impact that incorrect assumptions would have on key performance indicators. But according to company officials, what makes the supply chain solution truly “self-healing” is its ability to automatically correct discrepancies between planned and projected/actual performance, as well as its ability to continuously adjust supply chain models to ensure that they are structured and operating correctly and are optimized for maximum performance.

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