Company introduces Frames, Tools, and Workflow functionalities to unify procurement Business Intelligence, Data Analytics, and Process Automation

Focal Point, provider of a single solution for procurement decision intelligence, data analytics and process automation, today released a fully revamped and updated platform. In the three years since its launch, Focal Point has grown to be a strong market leader in the procurement software space. Focal Point updated its platform with a fully refreshed user interface and new functionalities including Frames, Tools, and Workflow.

Focal Point provides the industry's easiest solution to centralize procurement processes, automate workflows, connect people, and integrate data. The platform boosts procurement ROI and cost savings, eliminates manual processes and enables companies to embed social responsibility into every procurement activity while ensuring compliance – all with no code and low maintenance.

In addition to the new platform functionalities, Focal Point also unveiled a new corporate brand identity that builds on the company's market position and underscores its vision to make procurement faster, easier, more accurate, and more strategic than ever before. The rebrand includes a new website, logo and messaging that positions Focal Point for the future and reflects the values and benefits that the company provides to customers, prospects and partners.

"I've watched expectations for procurement evolve over 20 years from saving money, to saving the company, to saving the world," said Anders Lillevik, CEO of Focal Point. "Cost savings will always be important, especially in tougher economic cycles, but procurement leaders today need to think about sustainability, supplier diversity and other issues that affect long-term brand equity. Our revamped platform aims to help CPOs be that strategic voice and leader in their organizations through faster and better data-driven decisions."

The new user interface and functionalities include:

• Frames: Highly configurable, collaborative spaces to manage processes and integrate data and eliminate manual tasks across intake, projects, suppliers and categories. Frames build proactive procurement strategies by providing live context for decisions.
• Tools: Automated, customizable tools that enable procurement teams to manage data, build surveys, set goals, keep stakeholders informed, and create custom reporting. Tools build a culture of agility and visibility.
• Workflow: Easy interface for intake through co-working with clients, IT, legal, and other internal functions. Workflow fuels efficient, transparent and productive collaboration with conditional logic task triggers.

With the new platform, Focal Point remains committed to high-touch client success from implementation to custom configuration to ongoing account support. Focal Point's platform integrates seamlessly with any ERP/S2P system, point solution and data provider, ensuring maximum ROI on existing investments.

Today, Intuit Mailchimp (Nasdaq: INTU), the #1 email marketing and automation platform¹, announces the launch of a new global brand and product campaign: ‘Turn Clustomers Into Customers’—all crafted by our in-house agency Wink Creative (named Ad Age’s 2023 In-House Agency of the Year), with help from our friends at Pretty Bird, powerhouse director, Calmatic, and Breakfast for Dinner.

“We are in a unique position to be a marketing company marketing to marketers. So when research revealed that our advanced marketing customers’ biggest pain point was figuring out better ways to personalize at scale to make the most out of their web of customers, we instantly wanted to visualize that problem in a fun and simple way that marketers could identify with. And thus, the Clustomer idea was born. A tangled mess of customers with different behaviors that have all been grouped together as one audience,” says Jeremy Jones, Group Creative Director, Intuit Mailchimp. “At Wink, we think it's our best, most distinct campaign yet, and we couldn’t be more excited for the world to see it.”

So, What’s a Clustomer Anyway?

Most marketers think they have a Customer problem. In reality, they have a Clustomer problem.

When marketers fail to segment targets and personalize their messaging to the fullest extent, the result is CLUSTOMERS. Amorphous blobs of undifferentiated customers that all receive the same marketing message. Yuck.

The good news is Mailchimp has advanced marketing capabilities to help release marketers from the Clustomer (and see up to 141% more revenue with AI-built predicted segments²). To help them along the journey, we also recently announced a new generative AI assistant called Intuit Assist, a marketing strategist that will help you draft emails and help save you time.

Also this year, we released over 150 new and updated features, like advanced segmentation, custom reporting, more e-commerce automations and customer journeys, SMS marketing, and enhanced support options to help marketers spend less time creating emails and reports, accelerate their e-commerce growth, and reach their customers with truly targeted marketing.

These tools help unlock ‘personalization at scale’ so that marketers can see their customers and potential customers' individual needs more clearly: Some need to be reunited with their abandoned shopping carts, some need to be converted, some are ripe for cross-selling. Mailchimp’s advanced personalization tools use real-time behavioral data and automated triggers to take a Clustomer, break it into like-minded targets, then send them personalized marketing.

Mailchimp customers can tap into their customer data for more personalization than ever before, allowing them to:

• Get up to 7x more orders with automated journeys³
• Use 50+ behavior-based triggers for advanced personalization
• Segment with advanced AI tools for up to 141% more revenue²

Bringing the Clustomer to Life

The campaign, targeting advanced marketers around the globe, aims to build a whimsical and ethereal world built off the emotions marketers feel when moving through different phases of the classic marketing funnel.

For example, when marketers are in the early stages of attracting prospective customers and making them aware of a particular product or service they can often feel disordered, confined, and confused. That’s visually represented by the campaign’s hero image of the Clustomer ball.

As marketers begin to build awareness and consideration for purchasing among their target audience the campaign transitions into visuals that evoke feelings like: freeing, graceful, and ethereal.

Finally, when marketers reach the coveted stage of converting prospective customers into paid ones, untangling the complex web of their Clustomer problem, the visuals begin to feel more grounded, balanced, and clean. This represents the power and orderliness brought about by Mailchimp’s AI-backed marketing and automation tools.

The Impact Awards celebrate leading Workato customers who are pushing their industries into the future with automation

Workato, the leading AI-powered enterprise automation platform, announced the winners of this year’s Impact Awards at the company’s customer conference, Automate 2023. Established to celebrate customer champions on how they leverage Workato and transform their teams and organization effectiveness, this year’s winners included Snowflake, Hubspot, DoorDash, Media.Monks, and more.

“We are excited to have announced the winners of the Impact Awards at this year’s in-person Automate Conference. From myself and our entire Workato team, we’d like to extend congratulations to everyone involved,” said Vijay Tella, co-founder, and CEO of Workato. “These winners are a true testament to what innovation looks like when AI and automation are adopted to help transform the way a business operates. We continue to look to our customers for inspiration each and every day.”

Chosen by a panel of experts, including thought leaders, industry analysts, and company partners, Workato recognizes the following 8 customers who are making an impact with automation in their respective industries:

• Customer Experience Award | Snowflake: Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Wherever data or users live, Snowflake delivers a single and seamless experience across multiple public clouds. Snowflake’s platform is the engine that powers and provides access to the Data Cloud, creating a solution for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and data sharing.
• Business + Innovation Impact Award | DoorDash: DoorDash is a technology and logistics company that started with door-to-door delivery and is constantly in pursuit of team members who can help go from a company that is known for delivering food to a company that people turn to for any and all goods. The company’s mission is to empower local economies, shape how team members move quickly, and always learn and reiterate to support merchants, Dashers, and the communities they serve.
• Social Impact Award | Hubspot: HubSpot is a leading CRM platform that provides software and support to help businesses grow better. Our platform includes marketing, sales, service, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our customers’ needs at any stage of growth. Today, thousands of customers around the world use the company’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and integrations to attract, engage, and delight customers.
• Embedded Innovation Award | Wrike: Wrike is an enterprise-ready, cloud-based collaborative work management platform for managing cross-functional work at scale that is fully configurable and enables contextual collaboration in a secure environment. Enterprises use Wrike to offer a single digital workplace for all of their departments and teams.
• AI Visionary Award | Enbridge: At Enbridge, the goal is to be the first-choice energy delivery company in North America and beyond—for customers, communities, investors, regulators and policymakers, and employees. As a diversified energy company, Enbridge is uniquely positioned to help accelerate the global transition to a cleaner energy future and do it in ways that are ethical, sustainable, and socially responsible.
• Speed to Value Award | GA Telesis: GA Telesis LLC is one of the world’s largest commercial aerospace firms with over $1.0 billion in assets under management. GA Telesis operates sales, leasing, distribution, and maintenance facilities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Finland, and China. Over the past twenty years, GA Telesis has emerged as a global leader in the aerospace industry.
• Groundbreaker Award | Media.Monks: Media.Monks is the purely digital operating brand of S4Capital plc that connects 8,600+ digital natives across one global team. The Media.Monks team is driven by a common goal: to shift industries forward and unlock ambitious outcomes for our clients and our people. By combining media, data, social, platforms, studio, experience, brand, and technology services, the agency helps clients continuously reinvent themselves throughout increasingly rapid cycles of disruption.

Each of the winners is defining what it means to combine AI and enterprise automation to its fullest potential and how impactful it can be. The North American winners were acknowledged and presented their respected awards in person at Automate 2023. Additional international winners will be announced in the coming weeks, with award ceremonies taking place in London, Tel Aviv, Australia, and Singapore.

Dun & Bradstreet^® Global Business Optimism Insights point to divergent global growth in Q3 2023, with deterioration in advanced economies and improvement in emerging economies

Dun & Bradstreet, a leading global provider of business decisioning data and analytics, today announced Dun & Bradstreet Global Business Optimism Insights, its inaugural quarterly report gauging the optimism levels of businesses around the world. The report provides a unique and comprehensive view into the thinking behind the operational and investment expectations of business leaders.

Dun & Bradstreet Global Business Optimism Insights is an amalgamation of five indices for 32 economies including the Global Business Optimism Index, Global Business Supply Chain Continuity Index, Global Business Financial Confidence Index, Global Business Investment Confidence Index, and Global Business ESG Index.

The Q3 2023 Global Business Optimism Insights report finds that the global economy is expected to grow, though slower than it did last quarter, due to the decline in advanced economies in contrast with the growth in emerging economies. Nordic businesses are the most pessimistic about their supply chain continuity, followed by U.S. based businesses. The Global Business Investment Confidence Index has improved the most for Russian businesses, yet it remains the lowest among the 32 economies.

Additional key insights:

• The Global Business Optimism Index declined 1.5% in Q3 2023, compared with Q2 2023; it declined 2% for advanced economies and grew 0.4% for emerging economies, indicating that businesses exposed to advanced economies should exercise caution and revisit their growth strategies, such as enhancing client coverage across emerging economies. Economic growth will be asymmetric, posing risks and presenting pockets of opportunity. The impact of the economic cycle will be amplified by the depth of corporate linkages, including suppliers, vendors, and customers, spread across other regions.
  • Moreover, businesses across Financial Services, Automotive, and Metals & Mining are least optimistic, whereas those across Utilities, Trade, and Hospitality are the most optimistic for growth.

• The Global Business Supply Chain Continuity Index declined 5.8% in Q3 2023, compared with Q2 2023, due to increased delivery time and cost. Businesses need to consider supply chain linkages to have a comprehensive view of their upstream and downstream risks. Given the economic uncertainty and regulations, it is advisable to review supply chain resilience and look for opportunities presented by reshoring, nearshoring, and friendshoring trends.
  • Strengthening climate and emission regulations have lowered supply chain continuity for businesses in Mining & Metals, Construction, and Transportation, reiterating the importance of sustainability across all tiers of suppliers.

• The Global Business Financial Confidence Index declined marginally in Q3 2023 due to continued stress on balance sheets and unprecedented monetary tightening, suggesting that businesses must recognize that the current economic landscape necessitates a more proactive approach to credit risk mitigation. Having visibility into credit risk across the entire global portfolio can help inform treatment strategies and prioritize collections.
  • Businesses in the Czech Republic, France, Mexico, Spain, and the U.S. are the least confident about their financial conditions, whereas those in Japan, South Korea, and Turkey are the most confident.

• The Global Business Investment Confidence Index increased slightly in Q3 2023 as businesses expect the capacity utilization rate to go up this year, indicating optimism around investment recovery through 2023.
  • Technology and R&D investments top the list of expected capital expenditures, with nearly 40% of businesses anticipating 6-10% growth in investments for these categories, indicating that businesses exposed to these sectors can leverage underlying growth opportunities.

• The Global Business ESG Index for continental Europe lags the U.S. and Asia due to differing energy security interests and approaches to renewable energy within the region.

“The declines in Global Business Optimism, Supply Chain Continuity, and Financial Confidence indices reflect the underlying stress in the global economy,” said Arun Singh, Global Chief Economist, Dun & Bradstreet. “While the unprecedented monetary tightening has helped control inflation in some countries, it has also introduced the specter of an economic slowdown and stress in the balance sheets of businesses. However, the global economy has not fared as badly as feared, as most businesses anticipate a 2% to 6% growth in their investment levels across technology, real estate, product development, and sustainability initiatives, offering hope for improvement in economic conditions.”

Dun & Bradstreet Global Business Optimism Insights were created by synthesizing findings from a survey of approximately 10,000 businesses across 32 economies, along with insights from Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary data and economic expertise. The indices range from 0 to 100, with a reading above 50 indicating an improvement and below 50 a deterioration.

View the full report here.