Procurement Magazine June 2021 | Page 45

DIGITAL PROCUREMENT

In the innocent age of 2017 , years before we knew Covid-19 to ever be a thing , and sustainability and supply chain resilience weren ’ t garnering nearly the attention they are today , Dr Lisa Smith and Harald Nitschinger co-founded Prewave , a cloud-based , real-time supply chain risk intelligence platform that ’ s been adopted by some pretty serious players , such as Audi , Porsche , and Volkswagen .

So , how did it all start ? Dr Lisa Smith and Harald Nitschinger sit down with Procurement Magazine to share their story , how it all works , and why it ’ s a big enough deal to grab the attention of some of the world ’ s largest automakers .
Smith kicks us off , “ Harald and I , we founded Prewave together in 2017 . This was after I finished my PhD at the Technical University in Vienna in informatics , where I had already spent five years researching the technology that is now at the core of Prewave . So it ' s really a university spin-off that turned into a startup .
“ I was very much interested in the sustainability of companies and their supply chains . And while working on my PhD I was researching new data sources that could help us to gain more transparency and knowledge on what was happening in supply chains . At the time the research topic was if we could use social media data to better
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