A Next-Generation Digital Procurement Workspace Focusing on

Information Integration, Automation, Analytics, and Sustainability

Jan-David St

utz

1 a

, Oliver Karras

2 b

, Allard Oelen

2 c

and S

oren Auer

2 d

Robert Bosch GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany

TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Hannover, Germany

Keywords:

Supply Chain Management, Procurement, Automation, Analytics, Sustainability.

Abstract:

Recent events such as wars, sanctions, pandemics, and climate change have shown the importance of proper

supply network management. A key step in managing supply networks is procurement. We present an ap-

proach for realizing a next-generation procurement workspace that aims to facilitate resilience and sustain-

ability. To achieve this, the approach encompasses a novel way of information integration, automation tools

as well as analytical techniques. As a result, the procurement can be viewed from the perspective of the envi-

ronmental impact, comprising and aggregating sustainability scores along the supply chain. We suggest and

present an implementation of our approach, which is meanwhile used in a global Fortune 500 company. We

further present the results of an empirical evaluation study, where we performed in-depth interviews with the

stakeholders of the novel procurement platform to validate its adequacy, usability, and innovativeness.

1 INTRODUCTION

Today (2023), twenty-seven years are left until the

goals of the Paris Agreement have to be reached. Fa-

cilitating resilience and sustainability in supply net-

works in procurement can contribute to accomplish-

ing the set goals. Recent events, such as wars, sanc-

tions, pandemics, and catastrophes, show even more

the crucial role of a resilient and sustainable supply

chain. Some known supply chains that were consid-

ered stable are now disrupted. Failing suppliers can-

not be used any longer and must be exchanged with

new, more stable, or environmentally friendlier ones.

Current inﬂation pressures procurement and supply

chain management (SCM) even more. Prices and

product quality should ideally be stable, which can

be a difﬁcult challenge since Europe’s raw materials

and energy costs are rising (Ari et al., 2022).

At the Robert Bosch GmbH (Bosch), there is cur-

rently no central digital procurement tool that com-

bines data silos and provides valuable features in the

day-to-day work of purchasers regarding information

integration, automation, analytics, and sustainability.

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0166-2121

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5336-6899

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9924-9153

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0698-2864

Various tools are used alongside the entire procure-

ment process, which increases the complexity even

for simple tasks. Purchasers have to pull external

and internal information. Automation of simple and

low-risk tasks and analytics of various supply chain-

related data are rarely present, while sustainability is

sometimes completely lacking in existing tools.

Well-known Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

systems and specialized procurement applications

provide solutions. However, as Pek

sa and Gra-

bis (Pek

sa and Grabis, 2018) argue, customizing ERP

systems are cost and time intensive. Particularly in

the face of rapidly occurring supplier or entire supply

chain failures, rapid development and adaptation of

these critical systems is essential for driving compet-

itive advantage and improving business performance.

In addition, existing day-to-day operations involve

complex manual processes, lack collaboration, are

error-prone and time-consuming, do not provide new

insights, and do not support decision-making (Pek

and Grabis, 2018; Tarigan et al., 2021).

In this work, we propose a customized Digital

Procurement Workspace (DPW) that includes a Pro-

curement Information Space (PIS), a Procurement

Automation and Analytics Space (PAAS), and a Sus-

tainable Sourcing Space (SSS). The application and

spaces aim to facilitate a faster, more supportive, re-

silient, and sustainable procurement process. The PIS

Stütz, J., Karras, O., Oelen, A. and Auer, S.

A Next-Generation Digital Procurement Workspace Focusing on Information Integration, Automation, Analytics, and Sustainability.

DOI: 10.5220/0011845400003467

In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2023) - Volume 2, pages 385-396

ISBN: 978-989-758-648-4; ISSN: 2184-4992

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

385

provides personalized, automatically aggregated, and

summarized purchasing- and user-relevant informa-

tion to support purchasers in their daily decisions, to

keep them up-to-date, and to allow a quick overview

of the most relevant information such as announce-

ments. The PAAS provides features to access ana-

lyzed or aggregated data. PAAS also highlights key

data and allows triggering bots to reduce human-to-

human interaction as well as to automize low-risk but

time-intensive work. While the SSS provides analyt-

ical features, it focuses entirely on environmental im-

pact, risk detection, and overall sustainability by, for

example, providing a sustainability score.

We deﬁned overall goals so that the DPW could

solve the current problems. Based on those goals,

concrete requirements are inferred to ensure that the

required functionality is implemented. After the im-

plementation, in-depth expert interviews were con-

ducted and analyzed using Mayring’s qualitative con-

tent analysis to evaluate the developed application,

ensure that the deﬁned goals and set requirements

were met, and discover novel use cases and bene-

ﬁts. As the interview outcomes indicate, the three

key advantages of our approach are increased trans-

parency, efﬁciency, and decision-making. However,

this work outlines further dependencies and prerequi-

sites of beneﬁts. For example, centralization is a criti-

cal prerequisite for increased transparency and collab-

oration. Based on those ﬁndings, recommendations

going beyond the presentation of the concepts and the

developed applications are provided.

Paper structure: section 2 presents related work.

In section 3, we present our approach and its imple-

mentation. We present our interview study and its re-

sults in section 4. In section 5, we interpret and dis-

cuss our ﬁndings before we conclude in section 6.

2 RELATED WORK

Applications that support procurement are not new:

Odoo, Precoro, and Prokuria are a few examples of

systems that provide typical procurement functional-

ity. Besides those tools and some features contained

in ERP systems, there is also an increasing rise of lit-

erature regarding SCM, public (green) procurement,

and different technologies supporting those topics.

2.1 SCM and Procurement

The majority of legacy ERP systems are heteroge-

neous systems that different software companies de-

velop. Ma and Moln

a (Ma and Moln

ar, 2019, p. 231)

mention that it is a “big challenge for organizations

to develop and implement centralized and integrated

management systems based on their existing legacy

ERP systems to respond to the dynamic business envi-

ronment with agility.” They suggest the usage of on-

tologies and propose an integration framework based

on ontology learning including a basic workﬂow (Ma

and Moln

ar, 2019). Pek

sa and Grabis (Pek

sa and Gra-

bis, 2018) reviewed existing research on the decision-

making capabilities of ERP systems. They identiﬁed

different approaches for integrating decision-making

logic for companies. Since decision-making tech-

niques should be modiﬁable, scalable, and portable,

they suggest decoupling decision-making logic from

ERP systems. This decoupling enables the usage of

advanced decision-making techniques. Implementing

decision-making directly into existing ERP systems is

seen as inﬂexible and cost-intensive, leading to com-

petitive disadvantages.

In the last years, many articles regarding SCM

and procurement are published. For example, Re-

jeb et al. (Rejeb et al., 2018) outline the potential of

new technologies like Big Data analysis, Automatiza-

tion and Robotics, IoT, and Blockchain Technology

in procurement-related work since the entire supply

chain has already and will continue to have techno-

logical shifts. Nevertheless, the article does not fo-

cus on ERP systems. However, Tarigan et al. (Tarigan

et al., 2021) investigate and show enhanced ERP’s im-

pact on ﬁrm performance through green SCM, sup-

plier integration, and internal integration. The study

suggests that a company must improve productivity,

efﬁciency, speed, and services to innovate and sur-

vive in the market, which results in upgrading and

adjusting the ERP system. This suggestion, in turn,

leads to customizations at the ERP systems that are

regarding Grabis (Grabis, 2019) time-consuming and

cost-intensive. Nevertheless, this study also suggests

that ﬁt-gaps (differences between provided function-

ality of the ERP system and the company’s needs)

should be closed. As another gap, literature often in-

dicates a need to consider a supplier’s green perfor-

mance more instead of only focusing on the classi-

cal purchasing criteria. Igarashi et al. (Igarashi et al.,

2015) conceptualize the inclusion of green (in terms

of environmental- and climate-friendly) criteria into

the supplier selection process in public procurement

since purchasers tend to ignore those impacts. Includ-

ing the environmental and climate impacts in the pro-

curement process can be done when all relevant data

are gathered and provided to the corresponding pur-

chasers. To achieve that, Barrad et al. (Barrad et al.,

2020) focus in their study on emerging technologies

and concepts and their ability to improve procurement

operations. It suggests that classical Big Data ap-

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386

proaches like analytics and complex event processing

can be explored and adapted to already present pro-

curement processes to help reduce costs. The work of

AlNuaimi et al. (AlNuaimi et al., 2021) also investi-

gates Big Data analytics and procurement. Their work

determines that digital procurement does not inﬂu-

ence green digital procurement but nevertheless has a

signiﬁcant impact on the Big Data analytics capabili-

ties of the company. Furthermore, Big Data analytics

as a mediator between digital procurement and envi-

ronmental digital procurement leads to a positive im-

pact on environmental digital procurement. In other

words, this work describes the impact of Big Data on

a purchaser’s decision-making process.

A further improvement in a purchaser’s perfor-

mance can be reached with more user-friendly dash-

boards. Magnus and Rudra (Magnus and Rudra,

2019) discovered a gap between theory and prac-

tice regarding the availability of a user-friendly dash-

board, where the dashboard design is based on princi-

ples of cognition. The authors claim that dashboards

can facilitate transparency and that improved dash-

boards enhance decision-making in a supply chain.

They also indicate that if the information is extracted

and displayed conducive, users have a faster overview

of needed data. It should be of interest to compa-

nies to create better applications with the goal of user-

friendliness since that will enable employees to work

more efﬁciently along the supply chain. Another po-

tential obstacle to enabling Big Data analytics is in-

formation silos. To break down the information silos

along the supply chain, Zhan and Tan (Zhan and Tan,

2020) propose, in their work, an integrated infrastruc-

ture in order to enhance supply chain performance.

Even though there are still obstacles left, the work of

Handﬁeld et al. (Handﬁeld et al., 2019) predicts ma-

jor shifts in the sourcing and supply chain technol-

ogy environment in the next years. As proposed in

some other literature, fostering collaboration between

logistics and purchasing departments responsible for

managing the supply chain makes sense. (Ilie-Zudor

et al., 2014). Hecht and Hofbauer (Hecht and Hof-

bauer, 2022) expect potentials of up to 15 percent that

are not realized in procurement, even though strate-

gic procurement decisions achieve competitive advan-

tages and guarantee a company’s success.

Literature reviews provide a strong outline of the

research direction. The comparison of literature re-

views regarding green procurement done by us (St

utz

et al., 2023) using the Open Research Knowledge

Graph (ORKG) shows the relevance of the topic for

both the private and the public sectors. Signiﬁcantly,

the ﬁndings of the compared articles indicate the

consideration of user behavior and suggest a critical

analysis of the current priority for monetary factors

versus sustainability while purchasing. The arti-

cles of S

onnichsen and Clement (S

onnichsen and

Clement, 2020) and Adjei-Bamfo et al. (Adjei-Bamfo

et al., 2019) indicate missing literature and a lack

of research on the investigated topic. Appolloni et

al.(Appolloni et al., 2014), on the other hand, indicate

that an increase in literature is recognizable. Since

Appolloni et al. (Appolloni et al., 2014) considered

only the private sector until 2013 and the other two

articles only the public sector until 2017 and 2018,

it shows either a decrease regarding the topic, the

different handling of the corresponding sector done

by researchers, or a subjective view on the amount

of published articles. Nevertheless, the work of

Masudin et al. (Masudin et al., 2022) presents a

peak and further increase of literature regarding

green procurement for both the private and the public

sectors in 2018. Considering the indicated increase

in literature and the more emerging awareness of

society for sustainability, research will probably

continue focusing even more on green procurement.

To the best of our knowledge, procurement re-

search mainly focuses on public procurement, while

the focus on supply chain-related topics often com-

bines topics of ERP systems, their integration, and

their impact. Researchers often publish studies re-

garding the impact of new technologies, especially

Big Data, in procurement and SCM. At the same time,

researchers often combine Big Data with work that

fosters green and sustainable supply chains.

In summary, it seems like current research lacks in

deﬁning requirements for digital procurement appli-

cations, conceptually describing such an application

at all, as well as in evaluating novel and innovative ap-

plications in industrial settings. This is why our work

introduces requirements that outline and summarize

the set goals. We further present concepts based

on the speciﬁed requirements. Current research, for

example, the work of AlNuaimi et al., Grabis, and

Tarigan et al., also inﬂuenced the motivation, con-

cepts, and implementation. Evaluating the developed

application with in-depth expert interviews and the

resulting suggestions and interpretations enrich this

work further. In the end, the developed DPW should

be comparable to other procurement applications and

ERP systems. Thus a similar comparison as done by

Gomez Llanez et al. (Gomez Llanez et al., 2020) can

be achieved. Gomez Llanez et al. (Gomez Llanez

et al., 2020) compared the ERP systems Odoo and

Openbravo while describing the tools in general, their

features, and technical details.

A Next-Generation Digital Procurement Workspace Focusing on Information Integration, Automation, Analytics, and Sustainability

387

2.2 Procurement and ERP Systems

Different software applications support purchasers

already during the procurement process. Precoro,

Odoo, and Prokuria are such well-known and estab-

lished applications. In the following, we brieﬂy in-

troduce these applications to give an overview on the

current state of procurement applications.

Precoro’s

goal for its purchasing tool is to enable

transparency and collaboration while eliminating dis-

order from the procurement process. Therefore, the

tool focuses on procurement and is meant for the pur-

chasing department of a small to medium-sized com-

pany. Since the ﬁrst step of the procurement process is

the Request of Quotation (RfQ) the applications entry

point is the RfQ-related view. There, a section of the

created RfQs and all relevant information and actions,

like exporting, ﬁltering, searching, and expanding, are

provided. As soon as an RfQ is approved or rejected,

a notiﬁcation as an email is triggered. Through this

email, the notiﬁed user can directly access the next

step of the procurement process, where a user can ei-

ther place a purchase order or create a Request for

Proposals. One prominent feature of Precocor is the

creation of customized charts, e.g., to show the pur-

chase order based on the supplier or the department.

Odoo

is considered an ERP system, but pro-

vides features to support a company’s procurement

processes. When selecting the purchasing view, all

relevant details and actions like ﬁltering, grouping,

searching, and assigning tasks of created RfQs are

displayed. Creating further RfQs and bills is possi-

ble, which can then be downloaded as PDFs or shared

directly with colleagues. In general, Odoo provides

fewer features to support the procurement process.

However, as an ERP system, it also covers other busi-

ness areas like human resources or marketing that are

irrelevant to this work (Gomez Llanez et al., 2020).

Another procurement application that allows the

management of RfQs and suppliers is Prokuria

. In

comparison to the other applications, it also provides

features regarding auctions. Starting the application

leads to a customizable dashboard view that displays

different kinds of customizable and interactable so-

called widgets, like a table that shows only the cur-

rently active RfQs or a table containing all suppliers.

Prokuria provides different kinds of detailed views,

for example, for suppliers and events that contain

RfQs and auctions. Since suppliers can directly place

bids on open and active RfQs, they automatically get a

notiﬁcation via email if they are selected. Purchasers

https://precoro.com/

https://odoo.com/

https://prokuria.com/

can compare the suppliers’ bids in a comparison view

that offers visual representation in the form of a chart,

where a scoring system is provided. A report can be

viewed and downloaded to analyze the entire gener-

ated data. Another prominent feature is the possibil-

ity of allowing communication between suppliers and

purchasers based on the internal message system.

The presented applications claim to work well in

small to medium-sized companies and only if the en-

tire procurement process is done inside the applica-

tion. Customized features can not be easily added

and developed, and a further dependency arises as a

company. Bosch is a company with distributed de-

partments and already existing solutions for various

business cases. For this reason, a transfer to such an

application does not make sense. Furthermore, the

presented solutions miss general features or possibili-

ties for customizations regarding information integra-

tion, analytics, and automation mainly because some

of the company’s data is deeply embedded in a tech-

nological ecosystem. Additionally, aspects of sustain-

ability are not taken into account at all. For this rea-

son, among others, this work presents a proposal that

solves the mentioned problems.

3 APPROACH

Requirements are a prerequisite to building an appli-

cation. Therefore, we ﬁrst introduce the goals fol-

lowed by the application’s requirements. The actual

implementation of the containing spaces is described

as a result of the goals and the concrete requirements.

Thus the application can be evaluated and validated

based on the set requirements.

3.1 Requirements

Among other things, requirements specify and con-

straints the functionality of an application. Therefore

requirements are of value for other managers or de-

velopers who also want to adapt the concepts of this

work to their implementation or existing system. An-

other advantage is that stakeholders can easily verify

requirements, and a further evaluation of the system

can provide meaningful new insights (Glinz, 2007).

An application usually reﬂects a vision and there-

fore has some goals. Five domain experts in the pur-

chasing and business development ﬁeld have been in-

terviewed to ﬁgure out the goals of the DPW. They

are all employed at Bosch and responsible for the

management and/or development of digital products.

Through the interpretation of these interviews, the vi-

sions of the applications could be built, which signif-

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388

icantly reﬂect the following goals.

1. Enabling digitalization and acceleration of digital

processes that were previously not digital or only

partially digital.

2. Display aggregated data and allow interaction

with them.

3. Allow parallel work and collaboration between

colleagues and also departments.

4. Create knowledge transfer in terms of trans-

parency between departments and colleagues.

Since those goals are difﬁcult to verify, more con-

crete requirements are inferred. The requirements

were speciﬁed following the template for require-

ments by The SOPHISTs (TheSophists, 2016) and are

summarized in the sequel:

1. The DPW shall be able to show user-relevant data,

information (clustered, aggregated, and summa-

rized news), and tasks.

2. The DPW shall be able to show aggregated data

that are not only maintained by the user’s depart-

ment.

3. The DPW shall be able to allow collaboration with

all colleagues that uses the application.

4. The DPW shall be able to allow working on pro-

cesses that were not digital before.

5. The DPW shall be able to provide analytical eval-

uations in the form of calculations as well as

through visual representations.

6. The DPW shall be able to provide clustered as

well as searchable and ﬁlterable data.

7. The DPW shall be able to be personalized for ev-

ery user.

8. The DPW shall be able to break down the supply

chain for all relevant products.

9. The DPW shall be able to offer potential new in-

sights based on analyzed data.

10. The DPW shall be able to automate low-risk pro-

cesses.

3.2 Implementation

We implemented the requirements in an application

that includes three main concepts: Procurement In-

formation Space, Procurement Analytics and Automa-

tion Space, and Sustainable Sourcing Space. To en-

able these three spaces, the application consists of

multiple import jobs that fetch data from different

data silos. Those silos can also be from other depart-

ments and are not only maintained by the purchasing

department. The imported raw data is aggregated, an-

alyzed, and interpreted before being stored in a single

database. In this way, we can fetch data faster, and

reduce the number of on-the-ﬂy calculations.

The User Interface (UI) handles user logins via

Single-Sign-On and then allows the fetching of user-

relevant, supplier-relevant, and/or material group

relevant data. This way, the separation of concerns

is granted. Other views are, for example, the news

feed and the admin dashboard.

Besides the main features contained and described

in the corresponding spaces, more minor features will

only be mentioned and not described in detail. Those

are, for example, ﬁltering and searching of data, sup-

pliers, material groups, and users, favoring news, sup-

pliers, and links, downloading tables, and showing

context help for new hires. It is possible to adjust the

application’s layout in widget sizes and positions to

allow a personalized view. Additionally, users can

switch between the user-, team

-, and alias-view

Some widgets can be seen in Figure 1 and Figure 2.

Figure 3, on the other hand, shows the implemented

features of each space, the different views, and the

minor functionalities in a ﬁve-pillar model.

Figure 1: Overview of open auctions of a purchaser and the

total purchase order volumes in Euro.

A material group, e.g., screws and springs, categorizes

materials with the same attributes.

The team-view also shows data from team members.

The alias-view allows seeing data from other users.

A Next-Generation Digital Procurement Workspace Focusing on Information Integration, Automation, Analytics, and Sustainability

389

Figure 2: Overview of total purchase order volumes (top),

and all RfQs related to the selected supplier (bottom).

3.2.1 Procurement Information Space

The Procurement Information Space provides all

needed information regarding news, the latest posts,

community updates, and announcements. It repre-

sents a central point of information gathering and

aims to keep users up-to-date and well-educated in

their profession. Various structured and unstructured

data sources are accessed to automatically collect, ag-

gregate, and summarize their content to provide all

the user- and purchasing-relevant information. Af-

ter an automatic summarization, the information is

clustered and provided in natural language to a user.

Even though there can be different data sources with

nearly the same content, those are considered and

handled the same way to ensure the validity of the

information so the PIS can act like a single point of

truth. Data sources for news, posts, community up-

dates, announcements, and drop-off points to other

tools are conﬁgurable and provide even more infor-

mation. While interacting with the features of the

PIS (for example, the news feed), the information

gets more and more personalized but also considers

purchasing-relevant news based on team members’

suggestions and reading history. The PIS aims to im-

prove decision-making and time-saving as new infor-

mation could lead to better and faster decisions.

3.2.2 Procurement Analytics and Automation

Space

The PAAS allows users to access, analyze and interact

with procurement-relevant data like open RfQs, auc-

tions, and many more. All that data is divided into

three focus groups:

1. User-relevant data like open RfQs, auctions, and

contracts of the logged-in user

2. Supplier-relevant data like RfQs, auctions, and

contracts belonging to the selected supplier

3. Material group-relevant data like RfQs and auc-

tions for the selected material groups

The structured data is mainly displayed in a table

view, as can be seen in Figure 1 (widget names “Total

Purchase Order Volume” and “Supplier Auctions”),

but for a faster overview of some widgets, a chart view

is the default view, as can be seen in Figure 2 (“Total

Purchase Order Volume” and “Supplier RfQs”). The

chart view naturally cannot provide the same richness

of details as the table view, but highlights the most

important values, like statuses. In contrast, the ta-

ble view additionally provides further interaction. In

this way, procurement-relevant data is updatable from

the responsible user. Besides a graphical summariza-

tion of procurement-relevant data, users can also trig-

ger procurement-relevant bots in trivial and/or low-

risk tasks and processes. Those aim, for example, to

reduce human-to-human interaction regarding nego-

tiating low-risk volumes of materials. Another use

case is the bundling of RfQs across different depart-

ments. Using these and other bots saves time and

money since actual work is automatized and volumes

measured in Euro are optimized. Other features of

the PAAS support the decision-making of purchasers

since they provide, for example, a supplier rating

based on different well-maintained characteristics, a

forecasting of purchasing volumes, and a material

group share that indicates the share of each supplier

for the selected material groups. Improving trans-

parency is achieved by breaking down complex cross-

department processes while highlighting the current

state of the processes and the actual task logged-in

users have to fulﬁll.

3.2.3 Sustainable Sourcing Space

Transparency regarding environmental and risk im-

pact, as well as fostering a sustainable supply chain,

is the main subject of the SSS. Therefore, this space

monitors the environmental and climate impacts of

actual materials, products, and suppliers. In this way,

purchasers can directly see the impact of their sourc-

ing decision. The SSS automatically gathers informa-

tion and data on suppliers and their products from in-

ternal and external sources to calculate a transparent

so-called sustainable score. As a result, we can re-

duce manual research of purchasers and supply chain

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390

User

information related

Projects

Action Plan Measures

My Suppliers

Contracts

performance related

Auctions

RfQs

action related

Activities

Material Group

information related

Top Parent MG Share

performance related

Auctions

RfQs

action related

Negotiation Bot

Bundling Bot

Search | Filter | Charts | Notiﬁcations

User View Team View Alias View

Procurement

Application

Sustainable Sourcing

information related

Environmental Impact

Sustainable Score

External Product Chain

action related

Bundling Bot

Information

dynamic

Posts

News

Community Updates

Announcements

static

Bookmarks

Links

Supplier

information related

Certiﬁcates

Company Share

General Information

Supplier Hierachy

Contracts

...

performance related

Auctions

RfQs

Financial Ratings

Volume

action related

Negotiation Bot

Figure 3: This ﬁgure illustrates the Digital Procurement Workspace. The left pillar represents the PIS, the three in the middle

the PAAS, and the right one the SSS. The top indicates the different views. The bottom lists all fundamental functionalities.

experts. This sustainable score can trigger alerts since

a potential risk in the supply is detected or suggests

materials or products from different, more sustain-

able suppliers. Generally, the sustainable score ex-

ists in four stages but concentrates either on Corpo-

rate Carbon Footprint (CCF) or Product Carbon Foot-

print (PCF). The ﬁrst stage is the monetary CCF ap-

proach. In this approach, the CO2 emissions are ob-

tained based on the responsible revenue of a sup-

plier. For example, if the Anonymous Company is

responsible for 10% of a supplier’s revenue, it also

obtains 10% of its CO2 emissions. The second CCF

approach is based on the determined CO2 emissions

for different sectors done by a third party. So exter-

nal databases are accessed to retrieve data about the

CO2 emissions if, e.g., steal-related products are pur-

chased from a speciﬁc supplier. The third approach

is also based on third parties and external databases.

There, the determined emissions for speciﬁc products

are taken from such databases. In this third stage, the

PCF is calculated, which also applies to the last stage.

There, the actual emissions measured by the supplier

are communicated and taken for further CO2 emis-

sions reporting. In general, there is a focus only on

CO2 emissions. Other environmental- and climate-

relevant values are represented in CO2 equivalents.

As a result of the sustainable score and the entire SSS,

the supply chain should be more resilient, less prone

to stoppages, and more environment-friendly. This

way, the goals for the overall purchasing strategy can

be achieved more quickly, and the time for ﬁnding

a ﬁtting supplier is reduced. Additionally, the emis-

sions of current products can be reduced, the com-

pany’s reputation can be increased, and, as Valbuena

and Mandojana (Valbuena-Hernandez and Ortiz-de

Mandojana, 2022) describe, effective and sustainable

strategic partnerships can be achieved.

4 EVALUATION

We conducted several interviews to evaluate the de-

veloped application. The interviews aimed to analyze

whether the requirements and overall goals were ful-

ﬁlled, and the expected beneﬁts were obtained.

4.1 Study Design

To verify that the introduced requirements are cor-

rectly implemented in the application, qualitative and

quantitative analysis in the form of expert interviews

has been done. The interviews were held after the

launch of the ﬁrst version of the DPW. The experts

have been asked about their experiences a purchaser

makes while interacting with the developed applica-

tion that contains the described concepts. First, they

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391

are asked about the beneﬁts of each concept. Then

the interview changed to a quantitative manner, and

the experts could choose between different predeﬁned

answers regarding the time savings for each concept.

The same has then been done regarding decision-

making support. After that, the interviews changed

again to a qualitative manner to summarize the main

beneﬁts of the application and to give the experts a

chance to say anything about the DPW the interviewer

had not asked for.

4.2 Sample

In total, ten experts were interviewed. Two of them

are women, and eight are men. The experts are all

employed at Bosch and have different job roles like

product owner, department lead, sustainability expert,

junior and senior purchaser, and innovation manager.

The interview showed that most experts could answer

mostly without any counter questions. Nine of the

ten interviews were valid, and all interviewees had

the same interviewer and the same interview style,

and all interviews were conducted online, while nine

were held in German and one in English. One inter-

view could not be considered since the interviewee

struggled with answering the questions and wanted to

avoid the interview in general.

4.3 Data Analyses

The interview transcripts were, according to Mayring

(Mayring, 2000), answer-by-answer summarized, an-

alyzed, and further categorized. This way, various

categories have been found. Using Mayrings meth-

ods, the summarization continues until statements can

be generalized and further clustered so that categories

can be combined (Mayring, 2000). As a result, each

category is deﬁned by a deﬁnition statement. To com-

pare the categories in their importance, they have

been counted. The description of the complete cod-

ing scheme is beyond the scope of this paper, but the

emerging categories are presented in the results sec-

tion. The quantitative part of the interview is han-

dled differently. The answers to each question regard-

ing time-saving and support in decision-making are

counted and presented in the next subsection.

4.4 Results

In total, eleven categories describing a DPW’s bene-

ﬁts are found. They are listed and further described

in Table 1 and published in their raw data on Zen-

odo (St

utz et al., 2022). During the interviews, some

experts mentioned several shortcomings and risks.

Since we have not explicitly asked for shortcomings

or disadvantages, those are further discussed and in-

terpreted in section 5.

Figure 4: Number of answers regarding time saving.

Figure 5: Number of answers regarding support.

For the three concepts, the weighting and occa-

sionally the beneﬁts as a whole differ. The PIS mainly

increases the purchasing experience regarding scout-

ing new suppliers and day-to-day workﬂows, result-

ing in increased efﬁciency, which ﬁve of the inter-

viewed experts noted. Increased efﬁciency for a pur-

chaser means more suppliers can be contracted man-

ually and with better preparation which, based on the

experts, leads to better results in Euro.

On the other hand, seven of the experts noted that

PAAS mainly leads to optimization, while six experts

see increased efﬁciency in, for example, sourcing, ne-

gotiation, and contracting. However, it also provides

increased transparency and leads to time savings for

purchasers. Transparency is seen as the SSS’s main

beneﬁt, which eight of the experts noted. However,

the space also increases decision-making and adher-

ence and further development to the central purchas-

ing strategy. Some beneﬁts of the single spaces had

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392

Table 1: Overview of categories mentioned across all three spaces, with deﬁnitions and examples.

Category Frequency Deﬁnition Example Requirement

Transparency 14 Statement that indicates an

increase in transparency

“If we want to achieve a certain target, in terms

of CO2 footprint, then of course that relates to the

entire supply chain.”

2, 8, 9

Efﬁciency 11 Statement that efﬁciency

in time and the ﬁnancial

outcome is increased.

“You can organize activities in a more targeted

manner and thus work more efﬁciently, of course,

and you can also improve processes and then lower

prices.”

Decision-

Making

9 Statement that the process

of decision-making is im-

proved and better deci-

sions are made.

“It brings together decision-relevant information

quickly and compactly so that the buyer makes

the right decisions or is supported in the decision-

making process.”

Centralization 8 Statement that information

and tasks can be worked in

one central application.

“You have personalized information in one place

without system and media discontinuities.”

1, 2, 3

Optimization 8 Statement that the appli-

cation optimizes the work-

ﬂow of purchasers.

“Now you see: where I haven’t had a price change

for a long time, how have my raw material prices

developed, is this a good time to negotiate, or a bad

time to negotiate.”

1, 2, 5, 6, 9,

Strategy 7 Statement that the com-

pany or department-wide

strategy is adapted or ad-

hered to.

“If I also have a real conﬂict of goals as a result and

I notice the effects on my subgoals more strongly,

then I probably decide differently.”

3, 9

Time-saving 7 Statement that actual time

is saved.

“If the buyer today somehow has to do a lot of re-

curring, i.e. relatively monotonous, tasks that add

zero value, this naturally ties up capacity that is

now freed up.”

4, 10

Personalization 5 Statement that the applica-

tion provides personalized

information and is still fur-

ther adjustable.

“You have the information straight to you, they are

Tailor-Made for you.”

1, 7

Insights 4 Statement that new in-

sights are gained.

“Purchasers don’t really know 80 to 90 percent of

their suppliers. This means that if there is potential

there, you have to actively point it out to them.”

Collaboration 3 Statement that the collab-

oration and communica-

tion of employees are in-

creased.

“Today, this is used not only for purchasing, but

also for other areas such as logistics, sales, and

production, so that everyone can talk directly to

each other.”

Informed 3 Statement that employees

are in general better in-

formed.

“This also ensures that everybody is at the same

level of information.”

only a few mentions. Nevertheless, some of them are

highlighted as the main beneﬁt of an application that

contains such concepts. This fact applies especially to

the collaboration aspect. While the respective spaces

miss basic features regarding collaboration, experts

mentioned collaboration as one of the main beneﬁts

of the application. In general, the main beneﬁts are in-

creased transparency and time saving, better decision-

making, an increased collaboration of purchasers and

departments, and a higher purchasing experience in

day-to-day work through personalizing the entire ap-

plication containing the three spaces.

The quantitative part of the interview focused on

decision-making and time-saving since those two can

be seen as the main advantages of business infor-

mation systems and are also mentioned as the main

goals of the domain experts interviewed while set-

ting up the application requirements (Mes

aro

s et al.,

2021). During the evaluating expert interviews, the

participants were asked if the respective space (PIS,

PAAS, SSS) does not save time, saves some time,

or saves much time. The same was done regard-

ing decision-making, while the predeﬁned answers

were no support in decision-making, some support

in decision-making, and much support in decision-

making. As the evaluation in Figure 4 and Figure 5

shows, most time-saving can be achieved by imple-

menting a feature-rich PAAS. Based on the experts,

decision-making is supported almost equally while

implementing a PAAS and SSS. Nevertheless, PIS is

considered in both categories as some support.

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393

5 DISCUSSION

One of the goals of this work is to evaluate the appli-

cation against the set requirements. The expert inter-

views were designed to verify the requirements.

5.1 Veriﬁcation of the Set Requirements

All requirements introduced in subsection 3.1 are ful-

ﬁlled due to the implementing of the concepts.

User-relevant information is displayed via the PIS,

and tasks can be assigned inside the PAAS. The ex-

perts also mentioned as a beneﬁt that due to these

spaces, users are more informed, and the workﬂow

is considered more optimized. Thus, the ﬁrst require-

ment is fulﬁlled. Assigning tasks to others and com-

menting on processes or RfQs leads to increased and

optimized collaboration. This was indicated by the

experts directly and is seen as an overall beneﬁt of

the developed application while fulﬁlling requirement

three. On the other hand, requirements one and seven

are fulﬁlled by favoring suppliers, selecting the news,

and adjusting the application’s layout. That leads to

time savings and a personalizable application. Fur-

thermore, the implementation of the PAAS provides

the interaction (ﬁltering, searching, adjusting) of ag-

gregated data from different data sources. Those data

sources are partially maintained by different depart-

ments. The aggregated and analyzed data allows fur-

ther evaluations and visual representations. Accord-

ing to the experts, this results in an optimized appli-

cation that improves decision-making, increases efﬁ-

ciency, and saves time. Thus requirements one, two,

ﬁve, six, nine, and ten are fulﬁlled. In some cases,

processes that were not digital before are automatable

using bots. Besides, some triggerable bots can also

automate low-risk processes and thus reduce human-

to-human interaction. Those bots save time and are

responsible for fulﬁlling requirements four and ten.

The SSS offers to break down the supply chain and

provides further insights regarding the sustainability,

risk, and environmental impact of single materials and

products. According to the experts, that leads to in-

creased transparency and new insights, fulﬁlling re-

quirements two, eight, and nine. Furthermore, the

increased transparency and the new insights can also

lead to strategy adjustments, which can directly re-

ﬂect carbon emissions.

Among others, most business information systems

have the goal of reducing costs and time (Mes

aro

et al., 2021). Either while saving time for employees

or improving decision-making so the company can

reach a better result in Euros. By implementing the in-

troduced concepts, the DPW saves time and improves

decision-making. Besides a company’s performance,

climate change and the goal of reaching the set goals

of the Paris Agreement for 2050 are additionally rele-

vant. Since the experts mentioned that the enrollment

of the DPW improves the company’s performance but

also fosters procurement regarding sustainability and

resilience, the overall goals can be seen as achieved,

even though not all relations of the found beneﬁts and

the created requirements are described here in detail.

5.2 General Findings

Besides verifying the set requirements, other mean-

ingful new insights are found, like dependencies of

beneﬁts, some risks of the application, and sugges-

tions for potential enablers of such a DPW.

In general, it is recommended to focus more on

the PAAS and SSS. Figure 4 shows that according to

the interviewed experts, the most time can be saved

by implementing the PAAS concept, while SSS could

become more and more relevant in the future. On the

other hand, Figure 5 shows that SSS leads to better

decision-making. Due to the increased impact of pur-

chasers’ daily business regarding sustainability and

the environment and studies that have already shown

that green digital procurement applications foster Big

Data analysis competencies, it is recommended to set

fundamentals for SSS early in development (AlNu-

aimi et al., 2021). Concretely it is recommended to

start with centralizing information and allow as well

as support personalization features from the begin-

ning of development since they inﬂuence time-saving

and decision-making and are independent of other

categories. After centralizing and during the develop-

ment of new features, keep in mind that the new fea-

tures should either improve or support transparency

(e.g., showing the supplier’s responsible), collabora-

tion (allowing assigning tasks), or optimization (ag-

gregate data). As a result, new insights should occur,

and the possibility to adapt the purchasing strategy

based on the new insights is given. To sum it up, if

done right, a centralized and personalizable applica-

tion leads to the mentioned time-saving, higher efﬁ-

ciency, and improved decision-making but enables, in

general, all other beneﬁts presented in Table 1.

The DPW generally provides more features than

the presented competitors from subsection 2.2. Espe-

cially SSS- and PIS-related features are entirely miss-

ing in those applications. While introduced function-

ality of PAAS also lacks in those applications. The

found beneﬁts of the DPW are also not transmittable

to the earlier described applications. Moreover, it is

doubtful that the found and introduced beneﬁts can

also be achieved in those applications. Therefore, im-

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394

Figure 6: Inﬂuences of the different categories. The arrow

direction indicates the inﬂuence direction.

plementing a customized DPW is a good solution.

5.3 Dependencies and Risks

While evaluating the results, we discovered some de-

pendencies of the found beneﬁts presented in Table 1.

In fact, some beneﬁts act as a prerequisite for oth-

ers. For example, Centralization is considered and

also actually mentioned as the prerequisite for en-

abling Transparency and Collaboration. That, on the

other hand, leads to new insights, which further leads

then to improved decision-making and time-saving.

Another example, according to the experts, is that

personalization regarding news, blog posts, and an-

nouncements lead to more up-to-date users, resulting

in better decisions. All of those dependencies are out-

lined and contextualized in Figure 6.

While centralization is considered a prerequisite

for most other beneﬁts, as seen in Figure 6, it is also

mentioned as a risk for the company since a central

application could lead to a single point of failure. Be-

sides that, increased feature richness could lead to

complex maintenance, which results in higher costs

that purchasers must balance with a more efﬁcient

procurement. Nevertheless, initial high costs and the

maintenance for developing applications and new fea-

tures inside the application are generally known is-

sues in service-oriented software applications.

Due to too many powerless features with a poor

User Experience (UX), users could start to work less

efﬁciently or, worst case, avoid the application. To

prevent unsatisﬁed users, it is helpful to educate them,

either with software or through personal training. An-

other suggestion is to allow user inputs as early as

possible because if that is not the case, users must

use different additional tools for updating data, which

leads to decreased user acceptance and satisfaction.

5.4 Future Work

The evaluation of the developed application focuses

mainly on the beneﬁts for the company itself and its

positive impact on the users. Future work should also

consider the disadvantages of such an application.

Even though centralization and the lack of proper UX

are mentioned, experts can deliver even more possible

disadvantages if they are speciﬁcally asked for them.

Today the entire application does not use a knowl-

edge graph architecture. Currently, all the data is im-

ported from different sources and stored in a central

database. Ma and Moln

ar (Ma and Moln

ar, 2019)

suggest using ontologies and a knowledge graph be-

cause that is considered an effective technology to

integrate data from multiple heterogeneous sources.

Therefore, future work should use a knowledge graph

as the underlying technology while implementing the

presented concepts and features. Even if an appli-

cation implements the presented features based on

knowledge graphs (or any other underlying technol-

ogy), there is still a risk left. Poor UX could lead

to unsatisﬁed users, and as Magnus and Rudra (Mag-

nus and Rudra, 2019) claim, dashboards built based

on principles of cognition enhance decision-making

in a supply chain. Therefore, future work should fo-

cus more on UX-related topics.

6 CONCLUSION

Due to the urge to accomplish carbon neutrality, wars,

sanctions, the pandemic, and catastrophes, sustain-

able SCM has become even more important for com-

panies. As a global Fortune 500 company, we have

developed an application that encompasses a novel

way of information integration, automation tools as

well as analytical techniques. All developed fea-

tures can be categorized into one of the three intro-

duced concepts - the Procurement Information Space,

the Procurement Analytics and Automation Space,

and the Sustainable Sourcing Space. In-depth ex-

pert interviews were conducted to verify that the im-

plemented spaces perform as expected. The results

of the interviews show that the set requirements are

met. Besides that, the interviews revealed increased

time-saving and support in decision-making, espe-

cially due to the Procurement Analytics and Automa-

tion Space and the Sustainable Sourcing Space. In-

creased transparency, efﬁciency, and decision-making

support are mentioned most as a beneﬁt, but they may

not be the most important ones. This work encour-

ages other purchasing departments to build their own

DPW and provides valuable suggestions on what con-

A Next-Generation Digital Procurement Workspace Focusing on Information Integration, Automation, Analytics, and Sustainability

395

cepts and features a DPW should implement. Exist-

ing applications can also proﬁt from this work since

new concepts are presented, and the evaluation of

the beneﬁts could lead to strategy adjustments. Such

strategy adjustments could then inﬂuence procure-

ment regarding a more sustainable, resilient, and more

carbon-reduced supply chain so that a Digital Pro-

curement Workspace can help reach the goals of the

Paris Agreement in the next twenty-seven years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank all participants from the Robert Bosch

GmbH who were, in whatever case, involved with the

Digital Procurement Workspace and this work.

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