August 12, 2021 – Conductiv (Walnut Creek, CA), the third-party spend optimization solutions provider and consolidated subsidiary of Premier Inc. (Charlotte, NC), introduced Lumen, a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiative created to enable its customers to identify and implement inclusive supplier sourcing strategies.
Premier says that, through education and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered analytics technology, Lumen empowers Conductiv customers to efficiently increase spend with diverse suppliers, meet broader DEI goals and support local economies by choosing local, qualified and diverse suppliers for their third-party service needs.
Lumen was announced in August 2020, and since then, local and regional contracts with diverse suppliers have been added to Conductiv Contracts – expanding members’ access to vetted, diverse agreements, Premier says.
Members in Conductiv’s network spend 1.35% on average with diverse suppliers across more than 178 categories.
The company says that Lumen’s diversity analytics capabilities are broadly available, giving supply chains deeper, technology-enabled transparency into diverse, third-party services spend and providing actionable intelligence to strategically work toward enterprise-wide goals. This allows organizations to monitor their impact on an ongoing basis, target categories for improvement and report growth back to stakeholders.
In addition to creating a path to inclusive sourcing practices for supply chain organizations, Lumen lends its resources to local and diverse suppliers, connecting them with buyers at the right time and place of their sourcing lifecycle.
Suppliers that use Lumen access a cost-effective way to grow their business with local and regional healthcare providers.
A key focus of Lumen will be to deliver continuous education around the financial, population health and DEI benefits of employing inclusive third-party service providers.