One major problem you might face when fostering higher education sustainability with a custom software application is the software application part. Sustainability is about recycling, responsible procurement, and zero waste.
Software programs use energy-sapping tech from computers, laptops, and smartphones that can also contribute to e-waste when they become obsolete. Is there a way to align software solutions with sustainable collaborative procurement? Read this, to get answer to this question.
Addressing the Seeming Contradiction of Software-Based Sustainability
Although it’s ironic to depend on technology to ensure sustainability—with the logic being that you could save all that e-waste from throwaway obsolete hardware, metal, and plastic by going green—there’s value in incorporating environment-friendly policies to your procurement calculations.
- A Means to an End: Software solutions, like many other things, are a means to an end. It’s a method of streamlining your procurement tactics without wasting time, paper, and printouts on what to do. Everything is digitally handled, sometimes with A.I. or sometimes through bespoke software features. They’re flawed and can add to the mess, but their pros outweigh their cons.
- Aligning with Sustainability Initiatives: Collaborative university procurement is complex enough to require custom software development tech to optimize its procurement efficiency. However, it’s the responsibility of universities to make room for sustainability initiatives so that they make environmentally conscious procurement decisions as well.
- How to Build a Greener Future with Collaborative Procurement: Collaborating on procurement allows multiple universities to get out of their way in procuring their goods and services in a non-wasteful way, which already helps conservation efforts as well as addresses their collective budgetary concerns.
- Promoting Sustainability in Procurement: It’s easier said than done, but the key to promoting procurement sustainability is by choosing sustainable options rather than focusing merely on savings or cost-cutting to ensure optimized, collaborative university procurement. Instead of adding to e-waste to ensure procurement optimization, a more sustainable solution is explored.
- Applying Environmental Education in the Software Architecture: Some cutthroat policies and decisions designed to maximize profit and minimize spending at the cost of the environment will be avoided by collaborative procurement software systems in favor of educating students and teachers on creating a sustainable campus and infrastructure.
- What’s a Sustainable Campus Anyway? You can also use collaborative procurement to avail of ecological goods and services such as renewable energy sources, energy-efficient technologies like solar power, and green building practices to reduce your university’s carbon footprint when all is said and done.
The danger of A.I. and software automating university procurement to avoid the complexities and reap the rewards of collaborative university procurement is that they might not take into consideration things like e-waste, purchases that use up limited resources, and sustainability in favor of meeting cost-effective procurement metrics.