Viz - Bridging the Visibility Gap
This capstone project, developed in collaboration with the Dutch New Narrative Lab, investigates structural exclusion in EU supply chains and its impact on suppliers from underrepresented groups. Through qualitative interviews with both diverse business owners and procurement officers, the team found that purchasing decisions are overwhelmingly shaped by efficiency, familiarity, and perceived reliability rather than objective criteria. These informal dynamics reproduce existing network advantages, effectively locking out suppliers who lack established relationships with large buyers regardless of their actual capabilities. The result is a procurement landscape that remains opaque, relationship-driven, and resistant to the diversity it formally claims to support.
In response, the team developed a prototype digital dashboard designed to make the supplier discovery process more transparent, inclusive, and data-driven for both procurement officers and diverse suppliers themselves. The platform allows companies to search and compare suppliers using objective criteria, with KvK-based registration serving as a straightforward, low-barrier entry point for businesses seeking visibility. By drawing on scattered European and Dutch datasets and consolidating them into a single accessible interface, the dashboard also exposes a wider issue: the current state of procurement data availability and transparency across the EU remains fragmented and inadequate, making tools like this both necessary and overdue.