At Tradeshift, we understand that nobody wants to settle for standardized, rigid processes that deliver a single experience to everyone because you are not like other companies. Everyone is different! But using one flavor of SaaS makes you as good as the next person if they are using the same thing.
That’s why we build products that give you the flexibility to carry out business with your trading partners in the most intuitive and flexible way and on your terms. That means offering the functionality that addresses your most challenging use cases and delivers value to end users. We believe passionately that collaboration and choice are essential to that goal. Building on that philosophy, today, we are excited to announce the release of Magellan 2. This is our second major product update of the year, with only about 90 days separating it from the release of Magellan 1.
Magellan 2 focuses on three areas to drive value to customers: Business your way, collaborative P2P, and marketplace expansion. Together they work to deliver Commerce for all.
So, what’s inside this release? We offer a wide-range of new capabilities that have been added to the Tradeshift platform and to our individual solutions to enable Business your way. Through a new set of open APIs, for instance, you can control the user experience and create category- and company-specific procurement processes for purchase requests. You can also define custom rules and work queues to assign work items to the right individuals or teams who can process tasks most efficiently using our new platform services for task management.
We enabled even more collaborative Procure to Pay by centralizing all conversations and actions and have enabled users to share documents and product information, all within a single application. These enhancements are integrated into the Universal Inbox, which we introduced in Magellan 1.
Collaboration enhancements provide users involved in a workflow process with real-time visibility into the status of their work items and the ability to manage team tasks to collectively process work in a timely manner. Task manager and workflow queue management also allow teams to collaborate on invoice management. Employees can view workflow statuses within an application, and across the teams.
Collaboration enhancements also enable team purchasing and the ability to include subject matter experts to help manage more advanced purchase requests. This, in turn, helps buying organizations capture complex purchasing categories, and ultimately helps them increase spend under management.
As well, the collaborative capabilities in Magellan 2 enable shared service centers and business process outsourcers (BPOs) to more efficiently support their customers and process documents quickly on behalf of their customers.
In Magellan 2, we’ve also focused on marketplace expansion. For most companies, an internal company marketplace, or set of catalogs, represents the “procurement approved“ goods and services employees can buy from preferred, approved, and contracted suppliers. In Magellan 2, customers can expand their internal company marketplace beyond internal catalogs to include external sites, specialized solutions, and contracts through enhanced punchout capabilities. Employees can now shop on external sites that require a “round-trip” approval before the order is carried out. This gives employees more variety of choices while keeping purchases compliant. For example, by connecting to your Vendor Management System (VMS) for temporary labor, you can let Tradeshift manage the request, approval, order, and invoicing. Meanwhile, the VMS can handle the labor side of the process, such as engaging candidates, interviewing, onboarding, and timesheet management. The VMS could be deployed as an “app” on the Tradeshift platform.
Magellan 2 brings many new additional capabilities across all of our solutions and the platform. In Tradeshift® Buy, we’re introducing two types of pricing information. The first is tiered pricing, which helps you secure better pricing for larger order quantities on a single order. This will help you realize the value from your supplier contracts. The second is cumulative pricing, which allows you to track contract utilization. It also auto-checks invoices for cumulative pricing in order to help you achieve better contract compliance.
Tradeshift® Pay now features workflow queue assignments to allow you to define custom work queues to assign work items to individuals or teams. This lets you to simply assign the individual or team who can process an invoice most efficiently. Additionally, Pay includes services invoicing for invoice against contract. This lets you track contract utilization and tolerances on the basis of the amount to validate incoming invoices against services contracts.
Tradeshift® Go, our solution for collaborative, lightweight procurement for long-tail spend now includes custom request fields so that you can track what you need for approvals and spend visibility. And the new receipt upload feature lets you configure accounts to require receipt images (e.g., jpg, png, tiff, gif, or pdf) attached with requests. This enables end users to more easily manage the approval process for expenses and invoices.
We’ve also made enhancements to business analytics giving AP organizations even greater visibility into how their teams are performing and identify potential areas for improvement. It’s now easy to create a custom report using our simple wizard, which enables users to select the data source, dimensions, and measures they want to view for analysis, as well as apply filters. Users can also create an unlimited number of dashboards, each of which can have their own set of reports.
Finally, at the platform level, we have enabled new ways to integrate buyer-sourced data via a multi-system dashboard, which unifies document status for multiple streams. This means more process visibility, agility, and improved supplier onboarding/adoption. Beyond the dashboard, we’re also empowering individuals and teams to customize worklists to work more efficiently. Worklists are available across applications for users to maintain tasks and managers to manage work queues. All tasks with an active workflow can be displayed (eg: invoices, credit memos, procurement help requests, and purchase requests).
In summary, Magellan 2 offers an expansive set of new functionality built on an open platform that serves as the foundation of our innovations. No other competing solution allows you to tailor out of the box software to meet your business needs. Our enterprise customers are very excited that they can do business their way while leveraging the new features that are important to them.
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