CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with an 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 are continually innovating the way that procurement and supply chain leaders and practitioners drive value, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!

EcoVadis Kicks Off Annual Sustain Conference in Paris

This week, EcoVadis, a Paris and New York-based provider of supply chain sustainability and ethical sourcing rating services, held its annual Sustain conference at the Paris Marriott Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center. Sustain 2019 brought together more than 500 procurement, supply chain, and sustainability experts and human rights activists from around the world to learn about the most pressing environmental, ethical, and human rights issues facing global supply chains today. Shraysi Tandon, journalist and filmmaker of the documentary, Invisible Hands, as well as Jean-Louis Etienne, physician and explorer, were the keynote speakers for the two-day event. Ardent Partners’ Founder and Chief Research Officer, Andrew Bartolini, was in the City of Light representing the firm and spoke at the conference.

Live From Sustain 2019, EcoVadis Announces Sustainable Procurement Leadership Awards

On Day 1 of Sustain 2019, EcoVadis announced the winners of its third-annual Sustainable Procurement Leadership Awards and Sustainability Leadership Awards. The awards recognize companies for a variety of achievements in sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR), including “stakeholder engagement, supplier engagement, supplier portfolio CSR performance improvement, program leadership, and regional performance.” They also seek to recognize EcoVadis customers that are making strides toward improving CSR and sustainability efforts globally.

Winners of this year’s Sustainable Procurement Leadership awards include: Clariant, for Best Internal Stakeholder Engagement; Air Liquide, for Best Value Chain Engagement; Henkel, for Best Portfolio CSR Performance Improvement; and Cécilia Frasnetti, Saint-Gobain, for Outstanding Program Leadership. EcoVadis then awarded more than a dozen organizations for their Sustainability Leadership – by category, region, and corporate grouping (for an exhaustive list, please click here).

Congrats to all awardees and honorable mentions, and keep up the great work you’re doing!

Scout RFP Releases Dynamic Negotiation Analytics Tool at Spark 2019

At its second annual Spark conference in San Francisco last month, Scout RFP, the Bay-area provider of cloud-based strategic sourcing tools, announced the release of Scout Dynamic Negotiation Analytics (Scout DNA), which enables more advanced bid analysis and award decision-making. The tool integrates with its existing sourcing and supplier engagement platform and enables users to conduct side-by-side bid comparisons from multiple suppliers using multiple variables. Users can quickly and automatically compare the costs and savings from each suppliers’ bids, and use that insight to inform their negotiations. They can compare incumbent suppliers to new bidders, they can view historical spend to inform potential future awards, and they can view different sourcing scenarios to get a more comprehensive view of alternative options. And they can provide this feedback to the relevant suppliers to help them improve future bids.

Determine Cloud Platform Release 18.4 Hits the Solutions Market

In late February, Determine, Inc. (NASDAQ: DTRM), the Indiana-based provider of contract management and source-to-settle solutions for the cloud, announced the general availability of Determine Cloud Platform Release 18.4. This release includes several enhancements and the addition of features, namely the Platform Core, Contract Management, and Procurement. The Platform Core now has new grid functionality, which allows users to make adjustments to data display and enhance their interfacing and experience. Likewise, the Contract Management module now features an additional information field for requesters, namely legal teams seeking new or more information, and sell-side contract features meant to improve sell-side contract creation and execution. Moreover, the Procurement module now enables users to search for items by material attribute; it now allows purchasing workflows in requisitions to be managed in parallel with each other; and users can now split allocations with requisitions, POs, receipts, and invoices. Lastly, the Determine Contract Management App on the SalesForce App Exchange is now fully operational for sell-side contract creation, which will now enable users to manage and track contracts where they also work with customer data.

OpusCapita to be Divested, Change Ownership Hands

Late last week, we learned that Posti Group Corporation, the official postal service of Finland and owner of Finland-based P2P provider, OpusCapita Solutions Oy, announced that it divesting ownership of OpusCapita and selling to a fund managed by Providence Equity Partners LLC, a global asset management fund. The terms and purchase price for the deal will not be disclosed at this time. The agreement is subject to German government approval. At this time, OpusCapita employees will continue to fulfill its current terms and conditions, as the pending deal will not affect customer relationships. Executives from Posti, Opus, and Providence all hailed the pending deal as a very positive step for Opus, which will now benefit from having an owner that can focus more of its resources into developing innovative technologies to enhance its product offerings and stay current or ahead of the market. We will continue to follow this story as more information becomes available.

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