The 6th annual CPO Honors Awards are less than 1 week away and it is an exciting time for everyone at Ardent Partners! Yesterday we announced the complete list of finalists across the seven distinct awards.

As we approach the CPO Honors 2021 Awards Ceremony (click here to register), I wanted to share some of the details and great achievements of this elite list of CPOs, procurement executives, teams, and technologies. Let’s look at the Innovation Award.

The Innovation Award: This award is presented to the CPO and team that have used new and innovative strategies and approaches to overcome significant hurdles.

The Finalists:

Salim Reza, Head Of Procurement (Interim) at WaterNSW

Salim Reza started WaterNSW’s digital source-to-pay transformation journey two years ago, alongside a wider ERP rollout. This project began prior to the pandemic and at a time when Australia introduced new modern slavery reporting requirement applicable to entire supply chains. Highlights include: Launched a new strategic sourcing solution that captured traditional business requirements for sourcing, while also becoming the backbone system of record to manage the modern slavery requirements and create and accelerate a new process to find and prequalify indigenous and local suppliers.

Jean-Michel Dos Remedios, Sourcing & Supplier Development Senior Director at Bel Brands USA

Under Jean-Michel Dos Remedios’ guidance, the procurement team at Bel Brands developed a system to to predict the pricing for their spare parts supply chain. Highlights include: Faced with the challenge of manual data analysis that was too time-consuming and costly to build and scale accurate models for each individual item (since there were so many complex and distinct items in their overall demand),  Jean-Michel’s deployed a new system that was able to run simulations that enabled price forecasts of every needed item prior to running a sourcing event. The team’s innovative use of AI in their supply chain helped delivered tangible hard savings.

Linda Chuan, Head of Strategic Sourcing & Procurement Ops at Box

Linda Chuan and her team at Box developed an innovative approach to the development of a new supplier diversity program while also improving operational visibility and reporting across the general scope of procurement operations. Highlights include: Utilized new technology to improve reporting across the board that helped guide strategic planning and used solutions to capture and process third-party data including supplier certification data in order to meet internal executive reporting requirements.

Please join us in extending our congratulations to the finalists on their impressive and innovative work!

Want to see who wins?

Register today for

 The CPO Spectacular, CPO Honors webinar on November 16th

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