Time:1420m Subtitles: English
This learning path will allow you to deep dive all of the important tools.

Category Management is a strategic approach that focuses on the vast majority of an organisation’s spend on goods and services with third-party suppliers. It is a process-based approach and incorporates many familiar aspects of business improvement processes and change management. It is not an approach that is confined to purchasing, but typically requires the active participation of and engagement with stakeholders, functions, and individuals across the business to make it successful. Organisations, therefore, have to make an investment in time and commitment in order to deploy category management. However, the return on this investment is potentially very large.

Category Management is the practice of segmenting the main areas of organisational spend on bought-in goods and services into discrete groups of products and services according to the function of those goods and services, and, most importantly, to mirror how individual marketplaces are organised. Using this category segmentation, organisations work cross-functionally on individual categories, examining the entire category spend, how the organisation uses the products and services within the category, the marketplace, and individual suppliers. This extensive review process is structured to actively challenge what has gone before, and seek out and implement breakthrough opportunities that will generate significant value for the organisation. Value might take the form of leveraging dramatic reductions in purchase price, but it could equally be about reducing the whole-life cost or total cost of ownership, mitigating price increases in a rising market, reducing supply chain risk or securing increased innovation from the supply chain.

The Category Management Process is broken down into stages – the Five I’s. Each stage contains a number of tools that provide insight and help suggest approaches that can be used to adapt and improve existing sourcing approaches, to deliver sustainable competitive advantage for your organisation. We recommend that you complete these courses in order. However you can dip in and out as you require.