6 Elements Of A Robust Category Management Strategy
A robust Category Management Strategy and a plan will guarantee significant impact for your organisation with these 6 elements.
In my last article “The #1 Reason You Need a Well- Defined & Formally Documented Category Strategy!“, I purposefully oversimplified what a category management strategy is by stating that it answers the 5 W’s (Who, What, Where, When, Why) as well as the How of a particular group of spend. Ultimately, it will act as a guide to the Category Manager in his/her application of different procurement levers & tactics to generate value in the assigned spend area. I want to dive a little deeper on this topic by discussing 6 key elements that make up a robust category management procurement strategy:
1) Internal Needs Assessment: this should set a baseline for the strategic category management and provide a basic understanding of sub-categories, major suppliers, key requirements & stakeholders, internal controls/policies currently in place, and a brief category history and some of the challenges & successes it experienced. T
his section is particularly useful when reviewing your category management strategy with someone who is unfamiliar with the category and its scope.
2) Spend Analysis: the foundation of any category management strategy depends upon a solid understanding of the historical and (ideally) forecasted spend. Without accurate and granular detail, it’s hard to imagine how you can formulate any worthwhile strategy that you can feel confident in.
If you didn’t do anything else in developing a category management strategy, at least conduct a thorough spend analysis before making any type of recommendations to stakeholders or your leadership. There are a million different ways to slice and dice your data, however, at the bare minimum you should break your spend down by sub-category, supplier, location, and business group/facility.
Data visualisation is worthwhile to mention here and a skill in itself: how do you take data and transform it into an eye-opening story that opens the door to powerful business insights? There are several data visualization tools out there like Tableau that can help with this, but you can never go wrong by simply utilising Excel or PowerPoint. One of my go-to formats to visualize spend data is the infamous Pareto!
3) Supply Market Analysis: understanding of the supply market is key to developing a robust category management strategy. You can begin by gathering market intelligence and benchmarking information via a myriad of places and sources, however, Beroe Live is a decent place to start and it’s free. Commonly used market analysis tools are the Porter’s 5 Forces model as well as the Structure, Conduct, Performance (SCP) model.
Personally, I feel Porter’s 5 Forces model is more useful when entering a specific sourcing event or deal negotiation as it will help analyse the level of competition that exists at a specific point in time. Therefore, I tend to utilise the SCP framework as party of my category management strategy development process.
4) Category Segmentation: segmentation modeling really sets you up to effectively apply the appropriate strategic category management for the goods/services you are sourcing and should help prioritise where you spend your time and with who. The Kraljic Matrix, developed by Peter Kraljic, is a segmentation model that evaluates two key factors:
1) the overall importance of the good/service (commonly based off total spend, profitability impact, or value-add to the company) and
2) market complexity or supply risk.
These factors are then evaluated on a Low to High scale across 2 x 2 matrix creating 4 quadrants or categories:
Strategic Items(High Value + High Market Complexity/Supply Risk)
Leverage Items (High Value + Low Market Complexity/Supply Risk)
Bottleneck Items (Low Value + High Market Complexity/Supply Risk), and
Non-Critical Items (Low Value + Low Market Complexity/Supply Risk).
Similarly, this tool can also be used to segment your suppliers. This is important to note because your counterpart on the other side of the table has most likely engaged in a similar segmentation process in helping them evaluate the category management strategy to deploy with their customers. Do you know where you fall in their model? Does your supplier/category segmentation align with how your supplier views you as customer?
5) Strategy: all the fact-based analysis that has been conducted up to this point should highlight and allow you to articulate 2-3 high level strategies that will guide all procurement activity that will occur (I highly recommend anyone engaged in Category Management to read “The Purchasing Chessboard“ as it is a great tool to stimulate thinking around category strategy, procurement levers, and tactics that can be deployed).
It should also include goals or KPIs to help measure the effectiveness of its implementation. Leveraging 1 of the 4 general strategies in the The Purchasing Chessboard, if my strategy is to “Leverage Competition Among Suppliers” one of my goals or KPIs could be “Achieve 15% year-over-year costs savings in x good/service for next three years”.
6) Category Plan: now that you have this amazing category management strategy with lofty goals to save millions, a list of initiatives, projects or tactics must be developed that will deliver the results. The Category Plan should call out the name of the project, description of the project or tactic to be used, strategy alignment, value, and timing. A Project Prioritisation Matrix is a useful tool here to help you through this process. Although you may not formally develop criteria to plot your project on the matrix, it’s important to think about the Business Value and Ease of Implementation of the initiatives you have listed.
In summary, a category strategy is much more than a document that answers the 5 W’s as it becomes the critical guide to the Category Manager in his/her application of different procurement strategies, levers & tactics to generate value for the company they represent. By including these 6 elements in your category management strategy, you are sure to deliver significant impact for your organisation and see transformative results.
Let me know your thoughts and the tools you utilize to develop your category strategies (I’ve created a Category Strategy template for those who may be just getting started!)
