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!

Basware Launches “Smart,” Predictive Tool for Fast Requisition Review

Late last month, Basware, the Finland-based business network and procure-to-pay (P2P) solutions provider, informed us that is has launched a new predictive tool meant to speed up the requisition review process and result in more accurate approval/denial outcomes. Integrated with machine learning algorithms, the Approval Confidence Index (ACI) analyzes historical spend data unique to each customer to understand which transactions have met certain parameters and which did not. The ACI then assigns scores to each item on a requisition indicating to both the requisitioner and the approving manager the probability of each item being approved. The more transactional data on hand for the ACI to study, the better fidelity the ACI will have.

The ACI will help users focus their time and attention on requisitions with low probabilities of being approved, and guide them to make adjustments, like a different item or vendor, or additional justification for requesting that item from that vendor, before submitting. In a sense, the ACI serves tactical and strategic uses in that it instantly warns users that their requisition has problems that need to be corrected. In so doing, it saves companies time (and money) in man hours spent addressing problematic requisitions after the fact; and it helps to educate both requisitioners and approving managers on what items, spend thresholds, and suppliers are policy compliant; or perhaps how to make better requests or frame requests in a different manner.

EcoVadis Expands its Sustainability Intelligence Suite

Also late last month, EcoVadis, a Paris and New York-based provider of supply chain sustainability and ethical sourcing rating services, announced that it has expanded its Sustainability Intelligence Suite (launched at last year’s Sustain conference – read about it here) to include a few additional features to provide a more holistic supplier risk management experience for users.

The first of two new features, EcoVadis Ratings, provides procurement and supply chain managers with a supplier sustainability and assessment tool (“scorecard”) that measures seven management indicators across 21 criteria for four categories of risk: environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Users can leverage these assessments and scorecards for use in corrective action plans for wayward/low-performing suppliers.

The second of two new features, EcoVadis Spotlight, is essentially a digitized supplier audit management tool that enables procurement and supply chain managers to manage, soup to nuts, on-site supplier audits — from scheduling and logistics, to data collection, to report review, drafting corrective action plans, and integrating data collected from the audit(s) into those plans.

EcoVadis leaders also said that later this year, the Suite will include EcoVadis IQ — a vendor risk mapping tool that will autonomously, continuously, and intelligently scan EcoVadis’ database of suppliers, assess them across all 21 of its CSR measures, and map them along companies’ supply chains. The goal is to help procurement and risk management teams understand their risk exposure vis-a-vis their supplier base.

Ivalua Now Offers “Quick Deployment Package” for P2P Solution

In a bid to re-engineer the expression, “PDQ,” Ivalua, the California and Paris-based spend management solutions provider, recently announced the general availability of a quick deployment package for its P2P solution, enabling customers to employ best practices through its P2P platform in a fraction of the time. Ivalua leadership touts a rollout timeline of between eight and 12 weeks, owing to its supposed ability to integrate with most back end systems. As a result, users have quicker access to an intuitive, consumer-like buying experience and suppliers can onboard and become enabled faster.

Jabil Releases Second Quarter Financial Performance Results

Jabil, the Florida-based provider of supply chain, manufacturing, and engineering solutions, recently announced financial performance results for the second quarter of Fiscal Year 2019. Jabil CEO, Mark Mondello, attributes the company’s success to its new diversification program. Second quarter highlights include:

• $6.1 billion in net revenue
• $154 million in U.S. GAAP operating income
• $191.1 million in core operating income (U.S. GAAP)

Jabil company officers also shared that the company’s Diversified Manufacturing Services saw a 7% decrease in year-over-year revenue, while its Electronics Manufacturing Services grew revenues by 33% year-over-year.

DocuSign “Seals” the Deal with Another $15 million Investment in AI

Last month, DocuSign, a San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based eSignature and Digital Transaction Management solutions, informed us that it has invested another $15 million in fellow Bay-area contract discovery and analytics solutions provider, Seal Software. This follows a $30 million investment in Seal by DocuSign last summer (read our coverage of the news here), and DocuSign’s recent acquisition of SpringCM (read our coverage of the deal here) — both deals seen as part of an overall strategy to move towards intelligent contract search, discovery, and analysis. Seal already powers a couple of DocuSign’s products and services, and this additional $15 million ought to pay dividends for both companies as they continue to innovate and bring more robust contract search, discovery, and analytics capabilities to their customer base.

Tradeshift Partners with BuyerQuest Through Tradeshift App Platform

Tradeshift, the San Francisco based provider of supply chain payments and marketplaces, this week announced a new partnership with BuyerQuest, a provider of eProcurement and procure-to-pay (P2P) business solutions, based in Ohio. BuyerQuest, which provides an eCommerce experience for users, is joining the Tradeshift platform as an app partner, delivering an employee buying experience, reducing procurement process friction, and helping drive contract compliance. Tradeshift has built its powerful Tradeshift App platform, which has extended the Tradeshift Pay solution offering. The addition of the BuyerQuest eProcurement app will provide Tradeshift Platform users with access to an advanced procurement tool for spend management. BuyerQuest will be able to integrate seamlessly with Tradeshift through the Tradeshift Link integration connectors. This by way of Tradeshift’s recent acquisition of Babelway.

RELATED ARTICLES

Basware Releases Annual Report for 2018 Detailing Performance, Highlights

EcoVadis Announces Next-Gen Sustainability Intelligence Platform

Ivalua Refreshes its Source-to-Settle Platform with Release 160

Jabil Launches InControl – Intelligent Decision Support for Supply Chain

Seal Software Partners with DocuSign, Raises $30 million in Funding

The Marketplace is the Future – A Briefing with Tradeshift

BuyerQuest: Going Beyond Punch-Out

Tagged in: Ardent Team, Innovation, P2P, Performance, Process, Solution Providers, Source-to-Settle, Strategy, Suppliers, Tech Round-Up, Technology