Release 160 Highlights: Digital Supply Chain Collaboration, Guided Buying Enhancements and Multi-Tax Environments

Ivalua’s Platform Release 160 introduces new innovations across the entire source-to-pay process. Within procure-to-pay specifically, this includes significant advances in eProcurement, invoicing compliance and supply chain collaboration for greater visibility, process efficiency, control and compliance.

The release introduces additional guided buying capabilities.  For example, users now have a simple, streamlined and efficient way to buy multiple items with one purchase requisition, including hosted and punchout catalogue items as well as a mix of products and fixed-rate services.

New enhancements for the Invoicing solution include improved global compatibility with a feature to address multi-tax environments and helping to ensure compliance to e-invoicing regulations. To facilitate certain use cases such as emergency repairs, which may be time sensitive, customers can now create an invoice (or receipt) directly from a contract. 

With this release, Ivalua continues to lead market innovation around direct materials purchasing by facilitating more efficient and digitized supply chain collaboration between buyers and suppliers. New capabilities around Forecast Collaboration and PO Automation and Confirmation help reduce cycle times and risk of supply chain disruptions while also securing a stable supply of materials for production needs.

Cross-Catalog Purchase Requisitions with Products and Services:

Buyers now have the ability to populate, within the same purchase requisition, a mix of hosted, external and non-catalog items, allowing the user to create a purchase requisition with mixed line items of both products and services. This capability facilitates use cases such as a buyer needing cleaning service for a set amount of days, during a set period of time, together with the need for the cleaning supplies to accompany the service. The purchase requisition is composed of a service line with a beginning and an end date and with a product item coming from an external catalog.

With this new capability, Ivalua continues to drive spend management for all areas of spend, including indirect, direct and services spend, increasing efficiency and enhancing the accuracy of purchase requisitions and orders.

Invoicing – Addressing Multi-Tax Environments:

Ivalua customers are now able to select the different taxes at an invoice line item for multi-tax environments such as a Canadian tax environment.

The new feature provides the ability to indicate the different taxes on each invoice line. AP teams will be able to control and approve the invoice. For example, if the buyer is in the Saskatchewan province, whereas the supplier was in Canada but in a different province, the AP Team provides the missing information and is now able to check the taxes at invoice line level. This means that deductibility and self assessment rules can now be set for the different tax rates at allocation line level. When the AP team approves the invoice, the accounting entries are generated accordingly. The budget consumption is also accurately impacted. The benefits of this new feature include higher level of straight through processing due to fewer exception.

Supply Chain Collaboration/Direct Materials Procurement:

Forecast Collaboration:

Another new solution capability that significantly provides value to direct materials purchasing, is Forecast Collaboration. This new module enables buyers to digitally share and collaborate on demand forecasts for one or several materials from their MRP system with suppliers. Each Supplier responds with their own capacity to cover the volume needs and submits them to the planner on the buyer side. The planner can then review supplier responses in order to secure the supply chain and also identify potential supply chain disruptions and take the necessary measures.

PO Automation & Confirmation:

This new capability is mainly for direct materials transaction but can also be useful for indirect spend Suppliers are now able to confirm POs based on quantity, date and price commitment capability at a line item level. If mass volumes, import and export to Excel is supported. The buyer can adjust tolerances based on their needs, which then drive the approval workflow.

This new capability helps improve transparency and collaboration between buyers and supplier, increases efficiency and accuracy of supplier confirmation and reduces cycle time with automated rules-based approval workflow.

These are just a few of many areas of innovation that the Ivalua product team has introduced through Platform Release 160. For a full overview please see the full Platform Release 160 Press Release

If you would like to see a demo of the Ivalua Platform, please get in touch!