Here are recent product and service launches that highlight what’s new in a few trending areas of supply market intelligence.
Vertical/From Industry
Wolters Kluwer has launched LegalCollaborator, a legal engagement and competitive bidding software offering that integrates with its SaaS-based e-billing/matter management and legal spend/matter management platforms. For supplier discovery, users can view details such as strategy, staffing, and pricing structure, allowing legal teams to make “apples to apples comparisons” to “choose the best firm for each matter.” Wolters Kluwer provides information and software/services to professionals in healthcare; tax and accounting; compliance; and legal to name a few.
Science Exchange launched a new B2B marketplace for R&D teams in the life sciences industry. Buyers will have access to approximately 3,800 suppliers. Science Exchange offers the Supplier Orchestration Platform, which “sits on top of P2P and ERP systems and includes a powerful workflow engine and integration platform [and automates] the entire process of collaborating with suppliers from intake to payment.”
Walmart is making Route Optimization, its AI-powered logistics technology, available to all businesses as a SaaS solution through Walmart Commerce Technologies. “Route Optimization provides businesses of all sizes a way to optimize driving routes, pack trailers efficiently and minimize miles traveled.” Using this technology, Walmart “avoided 94 million pounds of CO² by eliminating 30 million unnecessary miles driven and optimized routes to bypass 110,000 inefficient paths.”
Environmental Risk Assessment
Athena Intelligence is a wildfire risk assessment provider. They recently expanded the area covered by its geospatial profiling tool, Voice of the Acre, to include Idaho and Wyoming. This follows its recent expansion to Texas and New Mexico. The tool now encompasses 41% of the Continental U.S.
The World Wildlife Fund and the Global Salmon Initiative launched an ESG risk assessment tool for aquafeed ingredients to improve visibility into supply chains and better identify and address possible ESG risks. Even though the tool is designed for the salmon farming sector, it may also be beneficial to other animal agricultural production sectors.
Cyber Risk Assessment
Earlier this year, cybersecurity risk rating provider, SecurityScorecard, launched Max, their new comprehensive managed service. This launch allows the company to go from risk identification to risk resolution all in one offering. MAX identifies risky vendors, remediates critical issues, provides continuous vendor monitoring with 24/7/364 visibility and streamlines vendor communications. The vROC (Vendor Risk Operations Center) delivers MAX either directly to customers or in support of MAX franchise partners.
Cyber risk management provider, Bitsight, and Moody’s launched the Implied Cyber Threat (ICT) offering, which is built on Bitsight’s cyber risk analytics engine and Moody’s powerful Orbis company database. ICT provides cyber risk insights and market context for more than 325 million organizations worldwide, “the highest coverage in the market by a factor of over 25x.”
AI and News/Information Sources
Recently FT (Financial Times), a long standing news publication out of London, released its first gen AI offering for subscribers. The tool is in beta and allows users to ask any question and receive a response using FT content published over the last two decades. The Verge reports the offering is called Ask FT and is currently powered by Anthropic’s large language model, Claude. FT indicates they are “approaching this as ‘model agnostic’ and seeing which one meets [their] needs best.”
Dow Jones Risk & Compliance recently unveiled its AI-powered research platform, Integrity Check. This solutions allows organizations to build an investigative due diligence report covering multiple sources in as little as 5-10 minutes for an individual and 20-30 minutes for an organization. The strength of this solution is that information is fully sourced as coverage comes from news sources in Factiva.
A group of newspapers owned by investment firm Alden Global Capital’s Media News Group has sued Microsoft and OpenAI saying “the companies unlawfully copied millions of their articles to train AI products, including Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.” The plaintiffs include New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, San Jose Mercury News, Orange County Register and Twin Cities Pioneer Press. Note: Although this news headline is not about a launch, it is highlighting the trending topic of AI and content copyright.
Consulting/Professional Firms Acquisition Sprees
In fiscal 2023, Accenture made 25 acquisitions and spent $2.5 billion. In 2024, it has already made a number of acquisitions. Ones to particularly note are agreements with Insight Sourcing, Flo Group, and Udacity. Insight Sourcing helps companies with cost optimization when sourcing and negotiating contracts for direct materials, indirect material, services related to capital expenditures, and energy procurement management. Flo Group is a European consultancy and Oracle business partner that focuses on global supply chain logistics. Udacity is a leader in EdTech, specializing in the development and delivery of proprietary technology courses that blend online learning with human instruction.
In March 2024, McKinsey & Company acquired Strategic Estimating Systems (SES), a consultancy focusing on cost estimation services for the oil and gas industry. “The integration of SES’ industry benchmarks will enable McKinsey’s capital analytics team to deliver capital cost estimates with greater accuracy and speed.”
Image by Amrulqays Maarof from Pixabay
