Afternoon Coffee: Manufacturing expands for 5th straight month; Jaggaer’s supplier risk webinar is tomorrow; SolutionMap Fall 2020 update ranks 77 procurement technology vendors

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Economic activity in the manufacturing sector continued to grow in September, according to the latest Manufacturing ISM Report on Business numbers released last week. The September PMI registered 55.4%, indicating an expansion in the overall U.S. economy, according to the Institute for Supply Management.

September’s number counts an expansion in the overall economy for the fifth consecutive month after a contraction in April because of the COVID-19 crisis. September’s PMI was down 0.6 percentage points from the August reading of 56%, however.

“After the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic brought manufacturing activity to historic lows, the sector continued its recovery in September,” said Timothy R. Fiore, Chair of the Institute for Supply Management Manufacturing Business Survey Committee. “Survey Committee members reported that their companies and suppliers continue to operate in reconfigured factories and are becoming more proficient at maintaining output. Panel sentiment was optimistic (2.3 positive comments for every cautious comment), an improvement compared to August.”

Jaggaer to host webinar tomorrow addressing supplier risk

Tomorrow, Spend Matters’ lead analyst Magnus Bergfors will hold a panel discussion covering how professionals can ensure they have a 360-degree view of their suppliers.

As part of a Jaggaer webinar series, Bergfors will be joined at 10 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 6 by Heiko Schwarz, a founder and managing director of riskmethods, and Emily Rakowski, the chief marketing officer at EcoVadis. They’ll address solutions for minimizing contract risk, the threats of future economic disruption, and how corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability can impact overall risk.

”If it wasn’t before, the pandemic has certainly put risk management near the top of CPOs’ priorities,” Bergfors said. “But risk management is a complicated issue with many types of risks to consider. ... We will talk about different types of risks, how to manage them and how to bring it all together."

Register for the Oct. 6 supplier webinar here.

In case you missed it, SolutionMap Fall 2020 launched last week

Last week, Spend Matters launched its SolutionMap Fall 2020 release. Our analysts assessed 77 procurement technology vendors, adding 12 new providers since the Spring 2020 update.

For the fall release, 60% of vendors provided fresh RFI data — that's at least double what we saw in some updates when we refreshed the data on a quarterly basis. Additionally, the Spend Matters team updated the ranking display, or bubble size, to now reflect a vendor’s number of customers, employees and revenue per customer to better convey insights and analysis on each vendor.

SolutionMap, which began in 2017, has become the definitive procurement technology benchmark due to the depth of analyst assessments, quantity of real-life customer inputs and frequency of release (twice a year) to accurately reflect vendor capabilities and market developments.

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