After a brief hiatus, CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with an 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 are continually innovating the way that procurement and supply chain leaders and practitioners drive value, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Tradeshift Announces Fourth Quarter, Full-Year Highlights for 2018
Late last month, Tradeshift, the cloud-based business network and spend management solutions provider, announced financial and operational performance results for the fourth quarter of 2018, which capped a whirlwind year of growth, expansion, and innovation, for the San Francisco-based startup. Highlights for the fourth quarter include:
- 250% year-over-year growth in new bookings
- $59 million year-over-year growth in contract value
- 178% year-over-year growth in revenue
- 112% year-over-year growth in gross merchandise volume
- 49 new customers added to its roster
2018 saw Tradeshift raise $300 million in Series E funding from big-name creditors Goldman-Sachs, PSP Investments, HSBC, and several other firms — amounting to more than $400 million in funding, and resulting in a valuation of $1.2 billion. Tradeshift’s success and valuation were also buttressed by tech innovations like the release of its Blockchain-based end-to-end payment solution, Tradeshift Pay, product enhancements, acquisition of cloud integration technology provider, Babelway, and integration of a couple supplier management-oriented mobile applications — kompany and FRDM to Launch.
Developed by Made in a Free World, FRDM enables supply management leaders and practitioners to monitor their company’s supply chain and procurement operations for human trafficking activity and risk. The app draws on databases of entities known to be involved in human trafficking/forced labor, global trade data, supplier, and purchase-level details to give users instant analysis and alerting of human trafficking across their supply chains – from raw materials to finished product.
Announcing Certify Purchasing, Certify’s First Move into P2P
Travel and expense management solution provider, Certify, recently announced the launch of Certify Purchasing, marking the Portland, ME solution providers’ first foray into procure-to-pay (P2P). Certify Purchasing is a cloud-based software-as-a-solution (SaaS) offering that digitizes and automates the P2P process by removing paper and automatically routing purchase orders, requisitions, and payments to the assigned parties. Line-of-business managers can exercise greater oversight and control by setting routing configurations and escalation conditions when spend reaches a certain level or meets a certain criteria. Certify Purchasing features two- and three-way matching for invoices to purchase orders in fulfillment the second P in P2P, thereby increasing efficiencies, decreasing payment times, and driving greater visibility into the whole process.
EcoVadis Launches Responsible Health Initiative with Customer Partners
This week, EcoVadis, a Paris and New York-based provider of supply chain sustainability and ethical sourcing rating services, announced that it has launched the Responsible Health Initiative (RHI), a partnership between GlaxoSmithKline, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, on the EcoVadis Platform. The goal of the RHI is to synergize resources among healthcare and pharmaceutical companies in a collaborative effort to drive social, ethical, and environmentally-conscious sourcing decisions in accordance with their companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Participants will use the EcoVadis platform to standardize CSR assessment criteria for suppliers, share and monitor performance, share rating and monitoring tools, and have easier access to reporting and benchmark data. Suppliers are able to participate, as well, and can upload their sustainability reporting (plus supplier codes of conduct and CSR statements) to help onboard them with other RHI participating companies.
Coupa Expands Partnership with Amazon Web Services to Drive IT Spend Through the Coupa BSM Platform
Last month, Coupa, the California-based provider of cloud-based spend management solutions, announced that it has expanded its partnership with Amazon Business / Amazon Web Services (AWS) in an effort to drive greater efficiency and transparency into customers’ IT spend. Using Coupa’s Business Spend Management (BSM) Platform, mutual customers will be able to purchase IT software products within AWS and, using its invoice cloud automation tool, directly issue electronic invoices to Coupa InvoiceSmash on the Coupa platform. This will create a seamless purchasing, invoicing, and payment process loop for mutual customers and enable them to capture indirect services spend purchased on one platform onto another. This ought to reduce errors and processing times, drive cost savings, and drive further spend under management for AWS and Coupa customers.
Unimarket 6 to Enhance User Interface for Sourcing and Procurement Tools
Late last month, Unimarket, the Maryland-, Australia-, and New Zealand-based provider of procurement and accounts payable (AP) solutions for the cloud, announced that it has launched Unimarket 6 featuring an enhanced user interface (UI) to boost overall user experience (UX) and drive greater productivity. The updated procurement and payables platform provides a role-based provisioning model to users, depending on their role in the organization (AP, contracts, procurement, sourcing, etc.). Other enhancements include a new menu for easier navigation and use on mobile phones, a redesigned check-out page that is said to improve readability, product tagging, a new catalog template, enhanced search filters, and several new API integrations that will enable users to integrate with other platforms to process contracts and payments, among other third-party integrations.
Xeeva Secures AI Patent for Use in Virtual Data Manager
Also late last month, Xeeva, the Michigan-based provider of sourcing and procurement solutions, announced that it has secured a patent for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to drive its Virtual Data Manager. Patent US10176427 B2 expands on previous patents issued to Xeeva that allow it to enrich spend data after it has gone through the classification and cleansing process — at the line-item level rather than at the supplier level. As a result, companies are said to be able to make better, more informed sourcing and procurement decisions because they are working with more complete spend information.
Enterprise to Deem: We’ll Pick You Up
Lastly, Enterprise Holdings, the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, National Car Rental and Alamo Rent A Car brands, announced last last month its intent to acquire Deem, the San Francisco-based provider of business travel and expense management solutions in the cloud. Enterprise is interested in acquiring the intellectual property behind Deem’s business solutions, and the talent that keeps innovating them. Deem’s Work Fource and Ground Work platforms are of special interest to Enterprise, which intends to close the acquisition in the first quarter of 2019.
Enterprise has been a minority investor in Deem since 2016, and the two entities have collaborated since 2011 when Deem began providing Enterprise with the back-end technology to run Enterprise Holdings’ EHIDirect travel booking platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Moving forward, Deem would continue to operate as its own entity from San Francisco; John F. Rizzo would remain as Chief Executive Officer; and the rest of Deem’s executive team would also remain in place.
RELATED ARTICLES
Tradeshift Acquires Cloud Integration Technology Provider Babelway
Certify Partners with nuTravel, Releases T&E Solution for Medium and Large Organizations
EcoVadis Announces Sustainability Leadership Awards, Next-Gen Sustainability Intelligence Platform
Breaking News: Coupa Acquires Hiperos, Rounds out its Third-Party Risk Management Offering
Unimarket Updates Sourcing and Procurement Tools
Xeeva Acquires eSourcing Solution Provider, Procurepack
Infor and Deem Collaborate on T&E Expense Management
