OREANDA-NEWS. Blur Group, the international e-commerce company providing a better way for businesses to buy or sell services, is releasing the latest upgrade of its e-commerce platform. blur 5.0 enables automation of the pitch selection process shaving weeks off of the time taken by businesses to find a solution that fits their exact requirements.

The release of blur 5.0 removes the need to wade through dozens of tender documents to shortlist the best supplier pitches.

Instead, the shortlist will be generated by the machine intelligence capabilities of blur Sense™ which uses a set of proprietary algorithms to automatically match suppliers and their pitches with the requirements of the brief. Further enhancements will see full scanning of pitch documents to provide an accurate shortlist of the top three tenders.

As well as shortening the pitch process for clients, the new technology will allow blur's business to scale more rapidly with fewer man hours consumed shortlisting pitches that right now, can run into hundreds per project brief.

The new release also brings improved notification and messaging services, allowing customers and service providers to communicate better within the platform. Both buyers and sellers will be kept up to date and prompted to take action on their project through the introduction of key notifications throughout the entire project life cycle.  

Collaboration also takes a stride forward with the implementation of on-platform messaging enabling both buyers and sellers to freely communicate about their project without the need to use separate e-mail or instant messaging tools.

This combination of both notification and messaging systems further enhances the security and viability of project progress.

The initial update sees the integration of service provider community features within the seller dashboard. All blogs, groups and other features will now sit within the main home screen.

blur CEO Philip Letts said: "blur 5.0 represents a big move towards the emergence of the first generation of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platforms specifically designed for services. Later this year we will release an API (Application Programming Interface) so that blur 5.0 will integrate easily with other enterprise software platforms.

Letts concludes: "blur 5.0 is a big leap forward and a key pillar of our strategy to become a Size Zero enterprise, achieving more with less."

About blur Group plc

blur Group is an international e-commerce company providing a better way for business to buy or sell services. To date 50,000 businesses have used blur to buy or sell services online, including companies like Amazon, Regus, Caterpillar, Argos, Danone and GE submitting over \$350m of services requirements to blur's platform.

blur Group is a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market (BLUR) and is headquartered in the UK with regional sales offices in the US and Europe.