CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up series continues this week with fresh supply management technology news and updates covering a few recent major announcements. 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 info at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Open ECX Announces Partnership with Medius, Enhancing AP Automation Capabilities
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Open ECX, a leading e-trading solutions and accounts payable (AP) automation software provider, announced a new partnership with Medius to provide their enhanced suite of advanced AP automation solutions.
The collaboration will see Open ECX’s statement reconciliation functionality providing true end-to-end automation for businesses looking to enhance their AP automation and compliance levels.
According to Matt Rhodus, VP of business development & strategic initiatives at Medius, “The partnership with Open ECX fills a void in our product offering with a statement matching and reconciliation solution that integrates with Medius’s AP automation platform,” he said.
“The expertise that the Open ECX team has in industries like construction means that customers get even more operational efficiencies in their financial operations.”
The suite of Open ECX products is designed to enhance operational efficiency and streamline AP processes through seamless integration, automation, and innovative technologies, and are compatible with most finance systems used across multiple industries and use cases.
Charles Robinson, CCO for Open ECX commented: “At a time when businesses are demanding much more from their finance automation solutions, we’re delighted to be partnering with Medius.
“Our evolving suite of products have been designed to help finance leaders automate all transactions, while integrating seamlessly into their existing systems and processes. When combined with the power of Medius’ solutions, the partnership will add huge value to customers who are looking to take advantage of holistic, automated AP systems,” Robinson added.
Read the full announcement here.
Zip Introduces New Enterprise Capabilities To Modernize Global Procurement and Drive Cost Savings
SAN FRANCISCO — Zip, a leading Intake and Procurement Orchestration platform and Intake-to-Pay suite, announced the launch of its new enterprise capabilities that enable businesses to drive compliance, strengthen integrations across other tools, and scale faster as the company helps customers, including publicly traded companies such as Northwestern Mutual, Coinbase, and Snowflake, save billions.
Purpose-built for large organizations in highly regulated and complex industries, Zip is introducing new enterprise capabilities to help procurement leaders orchestrate the entire procurement lifecycle and fully integrate Zip across any tech stack.
The company states that Zip Premier, a new suite of enterprise capabilities, empowers customers to:
- Enforce controls through more granular permissions by subsidiary, document, and other platform surface areas
- Stay audit-ready by maintaining comprehensive audit trails for requests, permissions, vendors, and more
- Increase visibility and control with automated integration monitoring and real-time alerts.
As part of Zip Premier, Zip is also introducing the world’s first Orchestration Library, a catalog of over 100 pre-designed workflow templates based on the best practices from the leading global enterprise customers. These workflow templates eliminate the need to design intricate purchasing workflows and can be seamlessly enabled with a single click.
According to Rujul Zaparde, CEO and Co-founder of Zip, “Traditional procurement solutions don’t meet the complex needs of modern enterprises who face an intricate web of fractured procurement processes across many business teams and systems,” he said.
“Developed alongside our largest enterprise customers, our new capabilities streamline the entire spending process, delivering enterprise-grade performance with consumer-grade flexibility so our customers can drive compliance and scale with speed.”
Read the full announcement here.
Circular Announces $10.5M in Funding to Scale First-of-its-Kind Platform for Sourcing Recycled Materials
SAN FRANCISCO — Circular.co, a leading sustainable sourcing platform, secured $10.5M to expand its massive database of post-consumer recycled (PCR) materials and its accompanying platform that streamlines buying and selling of PCR materials.
The financing includes a new $5.3M round, backed by Maniv, Oxygea, and Eclipse, which followed a $5.2M seed round previously led by Eclipse. Circular will use the funding to grow its team, expand to additional sustainable materials, continue to add more companies and suppliers, and deepen the scale and functionality of its platform.
According to Ian Arthurs, founder and CEO of Circular, “Buyers transitioning to recycled materials face the typical challenges of an emerging, analog market rife with inefficiency and a lack of transparency. They can’t find the material they need, and if they can find it, it’s too expensive – and if they can afford it, there are often quality or consistency issues,” he said.
“Existing relationship-driven systems fail to provide the information necessary for buyers to make fast informed decisions, and on the flip side, suppliers have a hard time being discovered by and getting access to serious buyers,” Arthurs explained. “Circular unblocks these common issues using data and technology to help buyers and sellers navigate the global market efficiently. Armed with our data, buyers and suppliers make faster and smarter business decisions and simplify their process to get sustainable materials into production now.”
Read the full announcement here.
Oracle Adds New Generative AI Capabilities to Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite
AUSTIN, Texas — Oracle announced new generative AI capabilities within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite that will help customers improve decision-making and enhance the employee and customer experience. The latest AI additions include new generative AI capabilities embedded in existing business workflows across finance, supply chain, HR, sales, marketing, and service.
According to Steve Miranda, executive vice president of applications development for Oracle, “We are committed to delivering innovation that matters to our customers, and the combination of OCI, Fusion Applications, and the thousands of customers that use these applications daily enables us to continually improve our services and deliver best-in-class AI,” he said.
“We have been using AI in our applications for several years and now we are introducing more ways for customers to take advantage of generative AI across the suite. With additional embedded capabilities and an expanded extensibility framework, our customers can quickly and easily take advantage of the latest generative AI advancements to help increase productivity, reduce costs, expand insights, and improve the employee and customer experience,” Miranda added.
Among the more than 50 newly embedded generative AI capabilities, several are within the Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM) platform:
- Item description generation: Helps product specialists quickly generate standardized product descriptions that highlight SEO keywords. With generative AI support for item descriptions in Oracle Product Lifecycle Management, organizations can save time, reduce errors, and improve the overall quality of product descriptions to increase customer engagement and boost sales.
- Supplier recommendations: Help procurement professionals quickly and efficiently add suppliers to their organization’s supply chain. With generative AI-powered supplier recommendations embedded in Oracle Procurement, organizations can use information such as product descriptions and purchase categories to identify suppliers, improve sourcing efficiency, help lower costs, and reduce supplier risk.
- Negotiation summaries: Help procurement professionals quickly generate a customized cover page summary for a specific negotiation. With generative AI-powered assisted authoring embedded in Oracle Procurement, organizations can accelerate negotiations, increase savings, reduce risk, and maximize supplier outcomes.
Read the full announcement here.
Zycus Collaborates with Microsoft on the Development of Generative AI-Powered Source-to-Pay Platform
PRINCETON, N.J. — Zycus, a global leader in cognitive procurement technology solutions, announced its integration with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. This integration is a step towards an ongoing effort to build the world’s first generative AI-powered S2P platform.
The company stated that this continuous engagement will harness the power of advanced AI to transform end-to-end source-to-pay processes, offering unprecedented efficiency, compliance, and ease of use. Zycus has already incorporated various generative AI capabilities in the existing S2P Suite under the Merlin Assist offering. It is available both through an app published on Microsoft Teams and via Zycus web app.
Some top use cases of Generative AI are enhancing the complete S2P process:
- Efficiency and time-saving innovations
- Enhanced source aggregation and risk assessment
- Democratized procurement via Microsoft teams
- Precision-driven AI models for informed decisions
According to Aatish Dedhia, founder & CEO of Zycus, “We are thrilled to partner with Microsoft. Many of our clients, global enterprises from across the world, have deployed Merlin Assist as part of our early access program and share very encouraging feedback on ease of use, compliance, and productivity. We are certain that sourcing & procurement will be fundamentally transformed in the months to come.”
Read the full announcement here.
Sayari Launches New Supply Chain Mapping Solution
WASHINGTON, DC — Sayari, a leading counterparty and supply chain risk intelligence provider, launched Sayari Map, a supply chain mapping and risk screening solution aimed at enhancing visibility into complex global supply chains.
The company stated that Sayari Map is its second product designed specifically to provide comprehensive network visibility at scale. The new solution empowers sourcing, procurement, and trade compliance teams to easily map and screen for direct and upstream supplier risk in bulk, while Sayari’s flagship product, Sayari Graph, facilitates in-depth analysis essential for addressing identified risks. Together, the solutions aim to simplify the typically complex workflow of managing compliance risks, including exposure to forced labor, ESG risk, global sanctions, and more.
According to Farley Mesko, Sayari CEO, “Sourcing, procurement, and trade compliance teams are increasingly accountable for managing non-obvious risks deep within their supply chains. Existing mapping and risk identification solutions are complex, manual, and difficult to implement at scale without incurring significant cost – and compliance budgets have not necessarily increased in line with regulatory scrutiny,” he said.
“Sayari Map is the next development in Sayari’s suite of products that addresses this exact problem — and does so with a unique approach. We use real trade data so users can be certain they are not dealing with theoretical risk, and proprietary product blueprints, which use AI to connect products with input components, so users can hone in on what’s relevant to their actual supply chains,” Mesko added.
Read the full announcement here.
