Supplier qualification document recognition through open-set recognition

Large and medium-sized manufacturing companies are concerned with maintaining their supplier registries with well-reputed suppliers sourced over time. Every supplier periodically undergoes rigorous qualification processes where procurement officers assess, among other factors, the supplier document compliance status. To this end, procurement officers periodically ask suppliers, via digital e-procurement platforms, for qualification documents of different categories. Conversely, suppliers promptly answer by handing out such documents that can, maliciously or inadvertently, be wrong. When wrong qualification documents remain undetected, and the associated suppliers are qualified, a threat to the overall business arises: procurement officers may entrust purchase orders to not compliant suppliers with unpredictable performances. Our claim is that equipping e-procurement platforms with document recognition based on supervised open-set recognition (OSR) could mitigate the problem. In particular, we deem OSR solutions suitable for supplier qualification document recognition due to their simultaneous abilities of i) recognizing documents belonging to relevant categories and ii) rejecting those belonging to unknown categories. Quantitative and qualitative results from a real-world case study in partnership with an Italian manufacturing company show that the proposed solution is viable.