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!
LevaData and Resilinc Partner to Bridge Sourcing and Supply Chain
Last month, LevaData, which provides cognitive or “smart” analytics technologies for procurement and sourcing, and Resilinc Corporation, which develops cloud-based global supply chain risk intelligence and management solutions, announced a formal solutions integration partnership. The two California-based solution providers will integrate Resilinc’s EventWatch AI risk monitoring and supply chain visibility data with LevaData’s Cognitive Sourcing platform to form the basis for a variety of new digital sourcing and supply chain applications for manufacturing organizations.
The partnership will provide customers with:
- An intelligent media-monitoring capability that automatically scans millions of multi-media content (news articles, blogs, social media posts, government agencies), in more than 50 languages, for events that could potentially disrupt a company’s supply chain operations.
- A global supplier database that enables users to identify risks within their supplier base, beyond Tier-1 suppliers.
- Community spend intelligence collected from Levadata’s user-base — data representing more than $60 billion in spend that has been aggregated and anonymized, and can provide users with insight into real-world direct materials spend.
- Access to LevaData’s intelligent virtual assistant, Leva, which is now integrated with Resilinc’s EventWatch to scan market intelligence sources, identify emerging risks and opportunities, and provide sourcing and supply chain users with recommendations — including negotiation tactics and strategies to optimize sourcing events.
The expected outcomes for this partnership include greater agility, performance, and visibility and business continuity plans that reduce costs and risks for manufacturers.
SAP Wants Us to Use More Recycled Plastic…and It Wants to Help
Also last month, SAP SE (SAP), the multinational enterprise software solutions provider, announced a new marketplace to help global companies use more recycled plastic and find alternatives to single-use plastic. This is effectively the second phase of a pilot program SAP launched last year, Plastics Cloud, which collected data on plastics and plastics recycling. In Phase 2 of the program, SAP will leverage the SAP Ariba Network to connect buyers with suppliers of certified recycled plastics and plastic alternatives. In particular, it will connect buyers with “waste pickers” who collect, recycle, or upcycle plastic waste, including ocean plastic. The initiative is intended to redirect spend on plastics packaging to more sustainable and earth-friendly alternatives while also supporting global communities that make their living cleaning up their own environments.
Spendency Integrates Spend Analysis App on Tradeshift Platform
Late last month, our friends at Tradeshift, the San Francisco-based provider of supply chain payments and marketplaces, told us that they have partnered with Sweden-based spend management solutions provider, Spendency to integrate the former’s spend analysis application on the Tradeshift Platform. Tradeshift and Spendency users will be able to use the app to analyze their spend using a combination of automated and manual workflows. Users have to upload their spend data to the app, but from there, Spendency will assist them in analyzing the data across different parameters, spend categories, and time frames.
New Frontiers: Tradeshift Partners with QEDIT to Build Blockchain-Based Trade Finance Platform
In other Tradeshift news, the company announced that its research and development arm, Tradeshift Frontiers, is partnering with Israel-based cryptographic solutions provider, QEDIT, to develop a Blockchain-based trade finance platform that can be used among competitors without revealing competitive information. It will be built atop Tradeshift’s Blockchain platform and incorporate a layer of privacy-boosting cryptographic coding provided by QEDIT that will enable trading partners to “record and authenticate” transferred assets on the shared platform. The goal is to draw more financiers to the platform and to boost more transactions in a trust-but-verify environment created on Blockchain distributed digital ledgers.
ReposiTrak Launches a Supplier Compliance Management Initiative
ReposiTrak, a Utah-based provider of compliance, food safety, and supply chain risk management solutions, announced last month the launch of a collaborative supplier compliance management program. Dubbed the ReposiTrak Certified Compliance Partner Program, the effort seeks to certify suppliers on its platform after they demonstrate “a consistently high rate of compliance with multiple trading partners.” There are currently more than 300,000 buyers and suppliers transacting on the ReposiTrak platform, making for ample options for trading partners. Thus, suppliers are incentivized to consistently deliver results, if not for the certification but for repeat business. Once suppliers become certified, ReposiTrak will allow them to advertise their certification status in company marketing collateral, further boosting their attractiveness to potential buyers on the platform.
