CombineNet Continues to Deliver More Advanced e-Sourcing Capabilities with Newest Enhancements to CombineNet ASAP® Product

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- CombineNet, Inc. today announced that its best-in-class e-sourcing product, CombineNet ASAP®, has been enhanced with new features which provide companies with even more advanced sourcing capabilities to support a wider range of sourcing and procurement strategies. This feature rich release includes multiple enhancements for buyers to create and manage advanced e-sourcing events that incorporate different types of items being sourced simultaneously, with advanced cost models, new rules for how suppliers participate in bidding events, and more extensive RFI questions and response types for evaluating a supplier's overall value to the buying company.

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"We continue to invest in e-sourcing technology development that supports the strategic activities that our customers are driving through their sourcing and procurement organizations, and this release provides innovative capabilities to help companies explore more advanced sourcing strategies," said Rich Wilson, CombineNet's Chief Executive Officer. "With these new features, our customers will be able to increase their e-sourcing effectiveness, improve sourcing team efficiency, and conduct more thorough analysis of sourcing and supply options and the impact of their sourcing decisions on corporate strategy."

As a SaaS-based solution, the latest enhancements to the CombineNet ASAP sourcing solution are now immediately available to all users, and include:

• Multiple Item Types – Enables buyers to create and manage sourcing events that include more than one type of item in the same event.  Multiple item type events can include items with distinct characteristics, different bid information to be collected from suppliers, and unique cost models for each item type.  These events allow buyers to aggregate larger spend pools amongst overlapping supply bases in a single event, or use non-normalized data to represent similar items with different specifications, reducing the work required to aggregate spends and normalize data before conducting a sourcing event.
• Advanced Cost Models – Buyers can now create If/Then formulas within their cost models.  This is required to support the evaluation of multiple types of items in the same event, but can also be used to create If/Then cost models that are applied based on the characteristics of an item, supplier profiles, RFI responses, or price and non-price bid responses as defined by the buyer.
• New Bidding Rules – Bidding rules can now be applied to support the buyer's sourcing strategies, by determining how suppliers must respond to both price and non-price bid components. Included in these bidding rules is the ability to control whether suppliers can increase their prices during a bidding event, or if there are minimum or maximum prices that can be set by the buyer.
• Enhanced RFI Capabilities – New Request for Information (RFI) enhancements improve the accuracy of vendor-supplied data and enable buyers to more effectively evaluate a supplier's overall response to a multi-stage e-sourcing event. These enhancements include new and more extensive question and response types, and the ability to include RFI responses as factors used in If/Then cost models, enabling buyers to apply different cost models and bid evaluations based on the supplier's responses to the Request for Information.

In addition, this release also includes a significant user interface enhancement designed to provide a better user experience for suppliers and deliver more value to buyers.  This release introduces a new Supplier homepage that provides an intuitive, step-by-step guide for suppliers to follow during the course of an e-sourcing event, with visible task-related status and action prompts that help suppliers participate more fully in e-sourcing events and maximize their use of CombineNet's Expressive Bidding® capability.

"Our customers recognize that higher levels of supplier participation in e-sourcing events translate into greater overall value to their businesses. With our redesigned supplier home page in CombineNet ASAP, we further improve our customers' ability to experience greater collaboration between buyers and suppliers in an online bidding environment," said Alan Himler, vice president of product management at CombineNet. 

For more information on the CombineNet ASAP advanced sourcing product, visit http://www.combinenet.com/products/esourcing-product/index.php.

About CombineNet

CombineNet, Inc. delivers award-winning best-in-class e-sourcing software solutions through its products CombineNet ASAP® for advanced e-sourcing, CombineNet Spend Analysis, and CombineNet Contract Management. Using these Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based sourcing products, CombineNet customers can rapidly adopt proven solutions for increasing spend under management and improving enterprise spend insights. Now in its twelfth year in business, CombineNet is known for its track record in driving significant bottom-line and productivity savings for its clientele which includes: General Mills, Hershey's, Heinz, Procter & Gamble, Sears, Johnson & Johnson, A.P. Moller-Maersk, Bayer, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Reckitt Benckiser, and many more Global 2000 firms. www.combinenet.com

SOURCE CombineNet, Inc.