Unveiling the 2024 Spring Platform Release: A Closer Look at the Latest Innovations

Spring is in the air,

...and so are the exciting developments in the tech world, particularly with the latest Spring Platform release from the PROS platform. In this blog post, we'll delve into the key themes, innovative features, and enhancements that make this release a game-changer in the B2B platform landscape. This release showcases enhanced AI capabilities, self-service functionalities, advanced analytics, and the introduction of the B2B marketplace.

2024 PROS Platform Roadmap Themes

PROS is committed to continuous improvement of our platform so we can help our customers outperform. Our 2024 roadmap focuses on new platform capabilities, empowering customer self-service, AI and analytics as well as extensibility and ecosystem.

Watch an overview of The PROS Platform Release - Spring 2024

Platform Capabilities

B2B Products now Featured in the PROS Marketplace

PROS B2B offerings take center stage in the new PROS marketplace, offering detailed information on products, benefits, and integrations.

We're happy to announce that the PROS B2B offerings are now listed in our PROS Marketplace at marketplace.pros.com

You'll find detailed information on each product offering there, along with the benefits and integrations that we support. This marketplace serves as a one-stop destination for exploring and accessing a range of business solutions.

Watch this video to learn how you can leverage the PROS Marketplace experience!

Smart CPQ Subscription Ramping

Subscription ramping helps with recurring revenue models by splitting up a subscription into different ramp periods that allow for fluid adoption cycles within the subscription time frame. This allows businesses to negotiate terms over relevant periods and deliver revenue predictability.

Self-Service Empowerment

Smart CPQ Collaborative Quoting and Self-Service Capabilities

Last release in Smart CPQ we introduced collaborative quoting that we know will revolutionize the customer experience. We’ve since simplified product exploration, enhanced usability, while remaining mobile-friendly so sellers can drive engagement and seize upsell opportunities. We want to help sellers provide their buyers with powerful self-service capabilities and a superior buying experience.

With the Spring release, Sellers can also now leverage their existing catalog configuration settings to deploy Collaborative Quoting very easily, enabling their buyers to browse the catalog browsing, add items to the quote, modify the quote, and signal acceptance of quotes. We also unveil enhanced mobile selectors and dropdown fields in Smart CPQ to optimize for smaller screens and ensure a more user-friendly experience.

Smart Price Management: New Features and Services

The Smart Price Management module introduces a revamped handling of high data volume, default pricing methods, and the addition of a comparison box plot. These features empower businesses with self-service tools and advanced analytics for better pricing management.

High data volume handling is a new configuration option in the master price list that allows for optimization for very high volumes of price records along with catalog items.

The new ability to show comparison box plots within Sales Insights allows for clearer insights into measure distributions when comparing one segment against another.

Finally, in response to valuable customer feedback, we’ve implemented a default pricing method feature that can be applied across all master price lists. This will allow customers to easily maintain uniform pricing methods and significantly improve operational efficiency across their entire organizations.

AI and Analytics

Core AI Features Unveiled

One of the highlights of this release are the core AI features, including the integration of Microsoft 365 Sales Copilot with PROS Smart CPQ.

With this integration, you can share information between Microsoft 365 apps, your CRM and PROS Smart CPQ. For example, the Outlook integration reduces time to responding to customer requests. This collaboration will streamline sales processes, boost productivity, and deliver personalized quotes more efficiently.

Gen IV AI Innovations and Enhancements

Further in the realm of AI and analytics, PROS Gen IV AI brings a new dimension to analytics with model health metrics, configuration enhancements, and improved navigational screens.

The new model health metrics allow you to navigate to the exact results that make sense for you and delve deeper into visual representations of the accuracy of predictions as well as view overall health of the model. 

Watch this video to learn how you can leverage this Model Health experience!

To ensure faster implementation we’ve improved the configurability of PROS Gen IV AI. When a price is chosen as a configuration metric, attributes can automatically be normalized to reduce the need for manual data processing.

Users can now designate different customer or product levels for pricing in Gen IV, offering similar flexibility and customization options compared to Gen III

Extensibility and Ecosystem

Enhancing Smart CPQ with Pre-Configured Products and Hyperforce Compatibility

In the spring release, Smart CPQ and PROS Subscription packages for Salesforce are now fully compatible with the Hyperforce architecture, ensuring that you can use the latest Salesforce cloud stack.

The integration of pre-configured products and compatibility with Salesforce's Hyperforce architecture streamlines product configuration processes, ensures seamless operation and business continuity within the latest cloud stack.

Smart CPQ Agreements

Enhancements in Smart CPQ Agreements enable seamless interactions with special price agreements via the partner portal. Now the same solution that's being used for direct sellers can be quickly adapted to different partner selling relationships including portals. 

Revamped Unit of Measurement Service in Smart Price Management

The improved unit of measure management comes with strong defaults out of the box so customers can get up and running quickly. Unit of measure and translations can also now be tailored and fine-tuned to fit your needs ensuring extensibility.

Conclusion: Wrapping Up the Spring Release Highlights

As we conclude this journey through the Spring Platform release, we’ll continue to drive innovation and value for businesses. From AI advancements to self-service capabilities and marketplace expansions, this release sets the stage for a dynamic and integrated platform experience.

In the coming months, we promise to build on these core themes, expand into new areas, and enhance user insights with generative AI and Gen IV AI. The future looks bright with Sales and Offer insights on the horizon, poised to bring even more value to businesses.

Stay tuned for more updates and enhancements as we continue to redefine the possibilities with the PROS Platform upcoming releases. Exciting times lie ahead as we pave the way for a more intelligent, efficient, and seamless B2B platform experience.