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Apple is leading the green supply chain movement in China, according to a new report that evaluated more than 150 brands on their supply chain environmental management efforts and effectiveness. The Corporate Information Transparency Index (CITI), issued by the international nonprofit environmental organization National Resources Defence Council and Beijing-based nonprofit Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, evaluated 167 brands on their supply chain environmental management in China using government-issued and public data on company suppliers from the last year.

In the heated exchanges over the pending Staples and Office Depot merger, which is still in limbo based on Federal Trade Commission review, there are two chapters not known by many, at least in detail, on the periphery of the arguments both for and against the combination: 1) why the late Thomas Stemberg, the founder of Staples, in fact started the business to begin with, and 2) that he had tried to buy the same business nearly 20 years before in the spirit of cost savings, which would be passed along to customers.

Coupa did it again. The provider set new records in the third quarter for overall company revenue and customer subscription revenue growth, according to the latest quarterly results. As a cloud company with recurring revenues that is also adding new customers faster than any other e-procurement-centric vendor we’re aware of, perhaps this news is not a surprise. Coupa now has more than 500 customers processing more than $120 billion through its solutions.

...Long live the e-procurement catalog (for now). The debate surrounding the future of catalog management right now is a healthy one to have. Some argue that catalogs, as configured today, are not dynamic enough to support capturing the long-tail of spend nor the frequent information and SKU updates necessary to make sure the business can buy what it needs. I am officially declaring the catalog dead ... at least it will be in the next 10 years — here's why.

At the SIG summit yesterday, a large global manufacturer (that will go unnamed until we get permission) got up on stage and presented a long chapter from its procurement technology transformation effort and specifically, in detail, how vendor file/master data management (MDM) tied into it. The organization, which has grown both organically and through acquisition, has multiple ERP systems and “at least seven” different instances of SAP. We might call this a tale of supplier/vendor file MDM on steroids. But with apologies to Arnold, this is far more than just “pumping your ERP up.”

I arrived at SIG’s Global Executive Summit in Huntington Beach, California, yesterday and was expecting a relatively quiet afternoon and evening. Of course, the plans were tossed out the window when I saw so many old faces from my FreeMarkets and Ariba years — past co-workers, clients, frenemies and more (the sourcing “bros” and “broettes” as I call them). After a few afternoon sessions — a surprising number covered services procurement and risk management, the two topics I’m speaking on while here — the evening was a whirlwind of catch-up conversations and hellos with my old crew and some new faces as well.

Sheena Smith, vice president of client services, and I will be covering the Trade Extensions U.S. Customer Event, focused on the topic of “managing complexity,” live throughout the day. (Expect some additional analysis and commentary later in the week.) We won’t be mentioning customer names but instead will share a blinded and aggregated view of what advanced procurement organizations are doing with Trade Extensions.

Xchanging, the business technology and services firm quoted on the London Stock Exchange, has had an interesting couple of months, so it was good to get the chance to speak to Ken Lever, the CEO, and Jim Reesing, global sales and marketing director, earlier this month.

Opus Global announced Wednesday it acquired Alacra, a 20-year-old data aggregation and analytics firm focused on risk and compliance solutions for financial services. The firm brings a gold-plated roster of premier data content partners to the deal. In practice, this means that Alacra is good at aggregating data from a large number of sources, deduping and cross-referencing this content with process workflow around it, thereby ensuring more reliable compliance.

Tradeshift announced today it released its new corporate buying solution, Tradeshift Buy, which the company said will increase visibility, improve spend management and add product content opportunities for buying organizations. Check out our initial analysis.

I stopped by eWorld, the biannual procurement event, in London, earlier today for a couple of hours to catch up with a range of faces, both old and new. I engaged a few firms that I had never heard of before in conversation, learning about new – and sometimes not-so-new – niches different providers are trying to fill in the market.

When we think about online platforms that intermediate between workers and whoever needs work to be done, we often think of freelancer marketplaces, such as Upwork (formerly Elance/oDesk) or freelancer.com, that support a broad range of work categories. However, there are also specialized work intermediation platforms (WIPs), which focus only on a particular work category or in a specific geography or language. In this article, we will look at several representative specialized platforms and comment on their potential significance.