CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with another assortment of supply management technology news and updates from the past month to share with our community. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you have news to share with us, please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Pallin’ Around: KellyOCG and Job Pal Partner to Improve Candidate Experience
Earlier this week, Kelly OCG, the Michigan-based outsourcing and consulting arm of Kelly Services, announced that it has partnered with Job Pal, a recruiting chatbot developer based in Berlin, to integrate its chatbot capabilities into KellyOCG’s digital talent management solutions and improve candidate experience. The goal of the partnership is to provide customers with an automated, intelligent, and on-demand chatbot that can answer questions and assist candidates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, thereby enhancing the candidate experience while augmenting recruiters. Candidates get instant help and insight no matter the time of day or day of the week, while recruiters can spend more quality time with candidates and working with them to place them on the right project for them. KellyOCG has launched a pilot program where it has already integrated Job Pal’s chatbots into its solution suites.
Elemica and DHL Partner to Enhance Supply Chain Risk Management
Pennsylvania-based Elemica, a supply chain business network solution provider, announced that it has partnered with DHL, the Germany-based logistics and postal company, to integrate DHL’s supply chain risk intelligence platform, Resilience360, with Elemica’s networks. Resilience360 provides near real-time supply chain intelligence reporting to end users primarily in the automotive, chemicals, life sciences, and technology industries as goods and services move throughout distributed global supply chains. It provides country risk trends and scores, and compiles global incidents into a weekly supply chain intelligence report, “360 Insights.” Resilience360 can provide supply management teams with integrated, end-to-end risk management capabilities to meet current and future threats to their supply chains. Incorporating DHL Resilience360 into Elemica’s business/supplier networks basically overlays near real-time risk intelligence onto an enterprise’s supply chain, giving end users and business users greater insight into risks and potential impact across their supply chain, and more options to mitigate or avoid those risks.
Compusearch Acquires FedBid
Earlier this month, Compusearch, a Northern Virginia-based contract management and federal acquisitions solution provider, announced that it has completed its acquisition of reverse auction services provider and fellow federal contractor, FedBid. Although the purchase price was not disclosed, FedBid will continue to operate under its name while integrating its online reverse auction tools onto Compusearch’s digital acquisition and contracting platform, PRISM, to present federal government customers with an integrated sourcing and contacting platform. Readers may recall that FedBid had been involved in a series of scandals involving the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the United States Air Force, and had restructured in an attempt to re-brand and move on.
Chrome River Partners with Salesforce to Quantify Travel ROI
Recently, Chrome River, the Los Angeles-based provider of digital spend management solutions, has partnered with Salesforce, the San Francisco-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform provider, to examine and ultimately quantify the return on investment (ROI) of business travel. Using a tool dubbed Prosper, Chrome River and Salesforce combine enterprise spend and CRM data into a map-based dashboard that displays customer locations. Users can populate Prosper with relevant data points from Salesforce, click on various customers, and view data like sales, revenue, and business travel related to that customer, and conduct pre- and post-travel analyses.
For example, users can review how much the enterprise spent on travel to a particular client site next to how much sales and revenue that customer represents for the enterprise. Users can leverage Prosper to determine how effective business travel has been, which teams or employees were most effective in representing the enterprise, and if other options, like videoconferencing, would be more cost effective. Prosper is also said to make business travel and expense reporting easier by populating expense forms with lists of possible event/meal attendees for the user’s convenience, a meal/cost-splitting option, as well as the option to manually assign costs.
Equidato Technologies Introduces SophiaTX Blockchain Platform
Late last month, Equidato Technologies informed us that they have introduced SophiaTX, a blockchain B2B marketplace platform that integrates with SAP. Equidato is a joint venture formed between Switzerland-based blockchain platform developer, DECENT, and SAP advisory and implementation firm, Venaco Group. SophiaTX is its brainchild, combining DECENT’s open-source blockchain platform with Venaco’s SAP application integration platform. As a result, the integrated platform delivers an open source, blockchain-based B2B marketplace for various enterprise stakeholders to buy and sell primarily SAP applications.
Tradeshift Joins Blockchain Consortium, Hyperledger, as a Premier Member
Just yesterday, Hyperledger, the worldwide open-source blockchain consortium hosted by The Linux Foundation, announced that Tradeshift, the California-based provider of supplier collaboration networks, has joined the consortium as a premier member. Gert Sylvest, CTO and co-founder of Tradeshift, will sit on Hyperledger’s Governing Board. Tradeshift intends to use its Premier membership to invest in and further explore distributed ledger technologies presumably blockchain. It joins more than 160 other companies, like Accenture, IBM, and Intel, in being apart of the Hyperledger community.
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