In our last write up of Promena in November of 2023, we introduced you to this two-decade old mid-market Source-to-Contract player (with some e-Procurement capability) based in Türkiye that does over 3 Billion in annual transaction volume. While a lot of that volume is still in Türkiye, Promena is expanding throughout Europe and into North America with its multi-lingual solution that supports 13 languages.

In that update we covered the core of their:

• RFX: which supports RFX survey forms, product selection (from the product library), supplier selection, bid management, response comparison (with lowest bid for each line item outlined), and award selection
• e-Auctions: which supports English, Dutch, and Japanese auctions; allows parameters to be configured; suppliers to be invited; and the auction to be run
• Contracts: when an award is selected, the system supports contract creation and indexing up to the signature (which needs to be wet, scanned, and uploaded) and acts as an integrated e-filing cabinet
• Supplier Management: information, relationship, baseline (KPI) performance management, and onboarding with a supplier suitability score (that is assessed through supplier responses to the buyer’s form-based questions) and quick access to all events and corrective action requests the supplier is involved in, products the supplier offers, and contracts the supplier is bound to
• Corrective Actions: are supported and can be buyer created, sent to suppliers who need to respond, and then buyers can accept or reject the response and can always search the complete history of requests
• ESG Management: which was mainly a section for collecting surveys and centralizing KPIs related to ESG
• Product Management: collects and stores the descriptions of the products and services the buying organization needs in the organization’s category hierarchy and the foundation of the catalogs supported by Promena
• Catalogs: from which organizational users to self-serve purchase standard, approved, on contract products and services
• Purchase Orders: that can be generated off of a sourcing award, contract or a catalog item

Since then, Promena has made updates in the following areas:

• Supplier Discovery: for identifying suppliers not in your database
• Supplier Certifications: for centralization and tracking thereof
• Contract Drafting: enhanced capability to pull in platform data
• Enhanced ESG/Supplier Profiles: on organizational suppliers
• Configurable Workflows: for platform processes and approvals
• Completely Redesigned UX!

Supplier Discovery

Promena has built an internal supplier directory with default (public) profiles for all of the suppliers across its customer database which can be searched by any organization on product/service and location and, if relevant, added to their internal supplier database (and then invited to events, etc.). (They are investigating integrating with an external supplier discovery platform to assist global organizations in more extensive supplier discovery.)

Enhanced ESG/Supplier Profiles

The ESG profiles have been enhanced, with graphical displays for easy analysis, and integrated news feeds with recent articles related to a suppliers sustainability efforts/carbon footprint (in beta, and publicly available in the next release).

Configurable Workflows

This is one of the two major enhancements to the platform that we felt you should know about. In the new version of the platform, all of the RFX and auction, contract management, supplier onboarding, and approval workflows throughout the application can be individually configured for each buying organization. Furthermore, they are all exposed in the administration section and a sufficiently capable administrator can edit the core workflows themselves or work with Promena on implementation to customize the workflows to their liking.

In addition to having standard workflow definitions for each module/section of the platform, the platform uses these to generate wizard-like path-based walkthroughs in every section that make it clear (at the top of the screen) exactly where the user is in the process, what they just did, and what they will need to do next.

Completely Redesigned UX

Much of the year last year was spent updating the stack, building modern workflows, and redesigning the entire user experience to be easier, cleaner, and much more obvious so that users can get up and running with little to no experience, and they have done a great job in this regard. It’s cleaner, more streamlined, and the enhanced use of workflow and templates allow organizations to define the right process with the right template that minimizes the work buyers have to do on a daily basis and makes it easy for users to find what they want in catalogs, follow along with events (as they can be invited in viewer roles), fill out surveys, and so on.

And while this did delay some of the planned functionality for the second half of 2024 (like line-item price breakdowns, which is now coming the second half of this year), it was definitely worth it because, once implemented (, configured to the organization’s process, populated with default forms and documents, and loaded with the existing catalog) most buyers will be able to sit down, dive in, and get an event live with no training.

Roadmap

As per above, items for this year include:

• enhanced supplier discovery through Promena‘s supplier marketplace (and possibly a third party supplier discovery player)
• enhanced ESG profiles with real-time news updates and AI summaries
• line-item cost breakdowns for deeper cost insight (and comparisons in the platform)
• Brazilian auctions
• Auction Guidance which will mathematically analyze the past 5 years of results (if available) on the product/category and advise you on which auction will likely generate the best results

For a mid-market company, it’s a fairly extensive platform that’s easy to use, easy to customize, and easy to grow on. This makes Promena a platform that should definitely be considered for your short-list if you are looking for a modern S2C mid-market platform with purchase order support and services support if you need it (either from Promena direct where their account teams manage over 5,000 sourcing events a year or from 11 Global Partners who can deliver integration and support services).