PERSIST

Problem definition

In the modern network economy, more than half of a company's total income is passed on directly to its suppliers. Therefore, not only from the perspective of an individual company, but also from the perspective of European competitiveness, the management of the interface between buyer and supplier, i.e. professional purchasing and procurement management (PSM), is of crucial importance. This requires first-class training and further education for buyers. Since the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution (I4.0), cyber-physical systems with autonomous machine-to-machine communication have been reshaping parts of our economy. PSM is one of the areas most affected by this. As a result, the skills that buyers need to manage and organize such systems and to efficiently assert themselves in an I4.0 world are also changing. There is a strong demand in both education and industry for guidance on how to manage this change in general and the training and preparation of purchasing staff in particular.

Objective

The objective and innovation of the PERSIST project is to identify the skills that are likely to prevail and those that are new to the profile of a European buyer in order to develop an I4.0 PSM skills framework, and to develop a module-based course for higher education to teach these skills, and c) to develop new didactic elements focused on gamification and game-based interaction for a student-centered teaching approach, including a gamified MOOC.

The challenge is that there is currently very little knowledge on how to respond to the change induced by I4.0 from a pedagogical perspective. The following questions arise:

• How does the buyer need to act in I4.0?
• What skills and knowledge are buyers likely to need in I4.0?
• How can today's students be trained in an efficient and modern way (i.e. student-centered) to become buyers of the future, i.e. already with regard to the new technologies?

Approach

PERSIST uses a range of methods, including expert interviews and Delphi, to generate and verify knowledge. For the practical application of a novel and student-centered teaching format, a module-based course using gamification elements and playful interaction concepts will be designed and created to train I4.0 changes. To design the module-based course, the PERSIST project follows the didactic approach of constructive alignment to design competence-oriented courses in academic contexts, starting with the definition of competence-oriented learning outcomes.

If you are interested in contacting us about the project, please contact our secretariat!