Easier than ever
With Kommers, Primona help public and private organisations to gain control and to steamline their management of procurements, supplier contracts and purchase orders - from need to invoice. Kommers makes it easier!
An excellent year despite the pandemic
An excellent year despite the pandemic
A warm thank you for excellent cooperation in 2020, to all our customers, partners and suppliers.
First of all, we would like to thank all our customers for many pleasant web-meetings, comments and cheers. We are always responsive to proposals for improvements and your suggestions are very important. This year has been very unusual in many ways but at Primona we are used to working over web so the Covid-19 pandemic has not affected us significantly. In fact, we have perhaps been even more efficient with customer meetings and projects. We believe that a lasting benefit experienced from this pandemic, will be that most organisations now realise that it is possible to make presentations and project meetings over the web, with the benefits it brings to the environment and for productivity.
Several new employees and a lot of work
The year has meant a lot of work for our fantastic team, they have done great achievements. We like to thank also our consulting partners from Forefront consulting group and Montell & Partners for excellent cooperation. During the year, several new, highly skilled employees were added. They have strengthened up in sales, delivery projects, product development, testing, training and customer support. We have now 5 qualified teachers who can do training in Kommers and it has really been needed this year. We have had several web courses every week and most of them requiring an extra assistant teacher. We now continue with recruitments for continued growth, so if you know a good developer, someone who knows how to run an IT-project or someone who think first-class support is super fun, get in touch with us or tell your friend!
New head office
On the first of July Primona moved its headquarter from Fleminggatan 20A to Vasagatan 50 in Stockholm, the very best location for meetings, a few minutes walk from the platform of the Stockholm Central Station. Furthermore, we opened an office in Söderhamn. However, most of us have been working from home since March and we are experts on Teams. However, in the future we see the need to open more offices in other cities in Sweden, in the Nordic region and around the world.
Several large delivery projects completed
By this time last year, we had just signed several major contracts with large organisations such as FMV (Swedish Defence Material Administration), Försäkringskassan (The Swedish Social Insurance Agency), Stockholms stad (the City of Stockholm including many entities), Veidekke A/S and Trafikverket (the Swedish Transport Administration via a contract by Forefront Consulting group). We are pleased to announce that all these projects are in production. With these customers added, Kommers now handles a very large proportion of Sweden's public procurement, both in number and by value.
Several new large and small contracts.
We receive inquiry’s almost every day, despite we work with a small marketing budget. During the year, many both small and large customers were added in both the public and private sector. We have several major new deliveries ahead of us to be completed in 2021. Most significantly, it is fun to see the increased interest in Kommers modules for ordering and invoice processing. An increasing number of organisations show interest in our integrated purchasing system - from need to invoice. Something we have been missioning about for more than 10 years now. It is also exciting to see that we start to sign agreements with international organisations, we will probably talk about this some other day.
The new procurement regulation and the Procurement Statistics Act
On July 1:st, a new law on procurement statistics (2019:668) and a regulation (2020:332) came into force in Sweden. Implementation is now on 1:st January 2021. All public authorities and entities in Sweden will from now on need to published on a registered database for procurement notices. Furthermore, such database will forward data to a statistical authority called Upphandlingsmyndigheten. Primona's registered database is called KommersAnnons.se and a completely new system was developed during the autumn. It will be officially launched just in time for New Year. On its web portal, anyone will be able to search and find call for tenders and other notices without need to create an account, from authorities and entities using Kommers.
Accelerating development
As usual, our talented software engineers have developed many new features and improvements. The development work is now so intense that during 2020 we went from 4 versions per year to one version a month and we are now working towards the concept of "continuous delivery" which means one release a day! This will allow shorter delivery times and tighter security updates. The development of Kommers is influenced by many things: customer requests, new laws, new markets, new purchasing trends and the availability of new technologies. In many cases, the development of a specific function is financed by an individual customer. When planning the implementation a decision is made if the function will be turned off for other customers, whether it becomes generally available or available as an option including custom settings. The customers who know us by now, are familiarised with the constant rate of improvements and sometimes they contribute themselves. The amount of new features added during the year is too much to write about here but let us mention one new feature: Functionality for contract follow-up became freely available to all customers. Hence, contract follow-up is not an option but it is included as standard and for good reasons. It is tightly integrated in both the Procurement module and the Contract management module. We simply do not see how contract follow-up can be an option, it is something that all organisations need to deal with.
The AI service KAI is in production
The AI-service KAI, which is developed in collaboration with Spanish The Reuse Company, is now in production. However, the year has not been optimal for a wider launch, so it will happen in the beginning of 2021. To explain what KAI is, we like to say that it is your new digital colleague who will assist you when you write requirement texts, a new feature that we believe will be considered indispensable in the future.
Our thoughts go to those who have no choice
For those of us who work in the IT industry, the Covid-19 pandemic has been pretty manageable. Sometimes it has even felt quite comfortable to avoid having to shave or make-up, we could get to work in a minute and come home in a whim. It has been worse for our heroes in the health care sector and even a nightmare for those who do not even have a place where they can follow the instruction to "stay at home". The latter group is particularly vulnerable and our gift this year therefore goes to Stockholms Stadsmission who do a remarkable job taking care of homeless people in Stockholm. As usual, we do this instead of sending Christmas cards.
With those words we like to say, from all of us at Primona we wish you all
A really relaxing Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2021!
2015