Business Analytics in Strategic Purchasing: Identifying and Evaluating Similarities in Supplier Documents

The increasing digitalization in the automotive industry is influencing the structure of the traditional value chain and calls for the handling of large amounts of data to remain competitive in a constantly changing environment. This results in new challenges for purchasing management, which has to cope with agile integration of service providers as well as interorganizational process automation using electronic data exchange platforms. This work analyzes the electronic document stream on supplier management platforms by proposing an automated text mining framework. Both textual components, e. g., requests for information and offers, and narrative material, e. g., financial and calculation data, are being analyzed by topic modeling and descriptive statistics. The methodological approach is introduced and illustrated by the use case of service provider documents in purchasing processes. The results reveal financial potential for purchasing and generally contribute to supply chain cost management.