Essent Corporation’s (UPIC: essent) Stephen Lussier and DistributorCentral’s (UPIC: DC) Chris Schlemmer and David Shultz have been named the recipients of the 2016 PPAI Tech Summit Awards. The winners will be recognized August 17-18 at the PPAI Technology Summit in San Francisco, California.

Through its Internal Innovator and Industry Collaborator recognitions, the PPAI Tech Summit Awards showcases and celebrates technology advances that bring success to individual companies and the industry as a whole.

Internal Innovator Award

Stephen Lussier, vice president of research at the Essent Corporation, will be recognized at Tech Summit as the Internal Innovator Award recipient. The award highlights the technological achievement within a PPAI member company—distributor, supplier or business service provider—and showcases the work of IT teams using unique technology or a unique use or implementation of existing technology.

At Essent, Lussier developed new technologies for automated order processing. The system creates orders so accurate that they can be processed by computers without a person having to look at them. The solution is intended to greatly reduce supply chain friction and the steep costs of order processing.

Industry Collaborator

DistributorCentral’s Chris Schlemmer, IT director, and David Shultz, vice president of operations, are taking home the Industry Collaborator Award. The award celebrates member companies’ technological achievements that bring the industry closer together to achieve greater efficiency, information sharing or collaboration.

Schlemmer and Shultz will be recognized at Tech Summit for their company’s development of a solution to assist suppliers in adopting promostandards.org’s inventory standards, and to make the data accessible to industry distributors or service providers.

Learn more about the third annual PPAI Technology Summit and register here.