Award recognizes innovation in contract auditing

The winner of this year’s 2020 Supply Chain Innovation Award (SCIA) was announced in September at the EDGE 2020 Live! conference. Joan Duemler, supply chain manager at technology company Intel Corporation, received the award for her presentation “Contract Digitization & Analytics: Goodbye Paper Audits, Welcome to Real-Time Scoring.”

Auditing contract documents and scoring contractual provisions can be a formidable and manually overwhelming task. Intel brought analytics to the auditing process and achieved a 99% improvement in velocity and more than $19 million in savings per year by using analytics.

Typically, each year at the EDGE conference, CSCMP hosts the SCIA program, a live competition in which a panel of judges join conference attendees to hear presentations on innovative solutions and real-world results from top supply chain companies. This year, due to the virtual conference format, the selection committee chose four finalists from the initial 30 submissions, while the additional two finalists were selected from a group of eight semifinalists who submitted a short video expanding on their innovation. In addition to the Intel Corporation submission, the other top five proposals included:

• DLT Labs/Walmart Canada: “Supply chain & finance transformation using blockchain” (1^strunner up)

DLT Labs and Walmart Canada created a cross-functional team to deliver a freight and invoice management solution using a shared ledger. Achievements included a live, production-level deployment in less than 90 days by leveraging DLT Lab’s configurable platform. Results showed operational improvements and savings, including virtually eliminating any disputes or invoice reconciliation requirements, along with streamlined workflows.

• FourKites/Land O’Lakes: “Reducing ‘empty miles’ through machine learning-powered collaboration”

This case study explains how FourKites uses advanced machine learning to help shippers, carriers, and brokers collaborate to eliminate empty miles and reduce overhead costs. Using FourKites’ solution, Land O’Lakes partnered with a wholesale grocer to share capacity on an overlapping lane, which resulted in a 25% cost savings for Land O’Lakes and reduced empty miles for the wholesale grocer by more than 1,000 miles a week.

• Intel’s Revolution in Silicon Wafer Transportation: “Transforming how we ship our wafers”

Intel introduced a new wafer media solution used to ship 300-millimeter silicon wafers. This solution led to a tenfold increase in the company’s transportation and environmental savings.

• Raymond: “Virtual reality helps solve a real-world labor and skills challenge”

For many companies, finding skilled laborers for warehousing and distribution centers is challenging. To address this challenge, Raymond worked with Broome-Tioga Workforce New York to develop an educational program, centered on the Raymond Virtual Reality Simulator, to teach job seekers the application-specific skills needed to fill warehouse and distribution center positions.

• Cisco Factory Quality Automation: “Exceeding customer expectations and streamlining operations”

Cisco’s Factory Quality Automation digitizes the analytics and communication required to purge defective materials from the supply chain. By digitizing communications used to issue alerts and share data with third parties and Cisco, this solution reduced purge decision time by 70%, lowered execution time by 60%, and projected a 80% reduction in recall costs.