Is your Category management process and toolkit excellent with quality and easy-to-use tools and templates?

In our recent global study, 77% of Improvers believe their category management process & toolkit is excellent, versus 22% of starters

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'How to' guides and templates help to define the standards for the process and?outputs e.g. supply market analysis, business requirements etc. Standardisation?liberates time, reduces stress and provides an ability to predict length of time to?complete category management tasks. It also generates consistent results, allows?improvements to be made against a baseline and standard training to be done.

A best practice process and toolkit is created by a design team that represents all?parts of procurement. Key components of the toolkit are:

Process Steps: These are clearly?defined activities that have multiple?levels of detail for different audiences –from a simple one-page summary?through to an activity level that allows?detailed project plans to be created.?They should define where specific?guides and templates should be used.?

Guides: Process steps must be?supported by useful and easy-to-understand 'how-to' guides that?provide category teams with?information on every step, activity, tool?and template in the process. These are?intended to allow users access to?information at different levels and?avoid over-complication.?

Templates: These should be clear,?attractive, easy to complete and relate?directly to defined process steps.?Completed templates should be?presented at decision gates.

Benefits include:

Team Engagement: Secure team?engagement by forming a design team?of category managers to create the?standard guides and templates.?

Ease of Use: Create all templates in?MS PowerPoint so that they can be?quickly filled out and combined for?different meetings.?

Example Templates: Create?completed 'exemplar' templates so?that category managers can?understand what good looks like.

Commentary & Insights: Include?commentary and insights on all?templates to define the key messages.

Cross-functional Working: Ensure?materials can be accessed, understood?and used by project teams formed with?stakeholders.

How can this be applied to my organisation??

Book a free assessment call?

Mark Hubbard, one of our Directors, will walk you through a series of quick questions to determine where you are now and to introduce a structured improvement programme to optimise your category management performance:

FUTURE PURCHASING'S GLOBAL RESEARCH INTO CATEGORY MANAGEMENT

Since 2012, we have undertaken the research five times. More than 1,800 participants from organisations with more than €5tn spend have taken part. This has provided more than 250,000 data points that allow us to pinpoint best practice and define the missing standards for implementing category management.

Contact us if you would like a copy of the full report.

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