2018 Supply Chain Innovation Award winner selected

The technology giant Intel Corporation took home the 2018 Supply Chain Innovation Award (SCIA) presented by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) for a set of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing tools that it developed to improve its sourcing decisions.

These tools take vast quantities of unstructured data and create targeted, proactive information that supply chain decision makers can use to solve complex sourcing issues. The tools also help identify new sourcing options and opportunities and signal potential supply disruptions and supply chain risks.

Each year at the EDGE conference, CSCMP hosts the SCIA program, a live competition in which a panel of judges hear presentations on innovative real-world solutions from top supply chain companies and select the best one. The award program receives approximately 50 submissions each year. In addition to the Intel submission, the other top five proposals included:

• An order-fulfillment solution that helped the online retailer of costumes BuySeasons triple picking speed
• A nonintrusive inspection process for trains traveling from Mexico to the United States at the Kansas City Southern Railway Company's Laredo International Rail Gateway
• Pharmaceutical company Pfizer's "Track-iT" app, which is used to track more than 15,000 health-care stock-keeping units
• A new Rapid Feature Flow Model used by the research and development teams at Schneider Electric, which increased productivity by 71 percent

This year's award was announced on the final day of the CSCMP EDGE conference in Nashville, Tennessee, at the closing session. Mani Janakiram, director of supply chain intelligence and analytics, global supply chain management, and David Bayba, data scientist, global supply chain management, accepted the award on behalf of Intel.