Manual data collection processes have long burdened traditional category management, hindering strategic thinking and execution. Vital information is scattered across various software applications, databases, and third-party sources, making analysis and comparison difficult. However, a transformative shift is underway.
According to a recent Economist Impact research report, C-suite leaders are urging for change in category management. They recognise it as a key driver of digital transformation in procurement, with nearly a third considering category management the top technological trend for the upcoming year.
Responding to such demands, SAP has developed a cutting-edge procurement solution that digitalises and streamlines the development, execution and monitoring of category strategies. This marks a significant step forward, empowering category management professionals and meeting the expectations of C-level executives for an innovative approach to category management.
SAP Category Management
SAP Category Management revolutionises procurement practices by eliminating manual tracking and presentation tools. This solution empowers category managers with strategic data utilisation, enabling them to identify trends, devise and implement effective strategies, and assess performance using tangible business metrics.
Key benefits of SAP Category Management include:
- Comprehensive Insights: Gain in-depth, data-driven insights to develop a cohesive category strategy.
- Embedded Market Dynamics: Utilise real-time market intelligence to stay ahead in your category.
- Consistent Frameworks: Implement consistent category management frameworks across different regions for enhanced efficiency.
- Opportunity Analysis: Uncover valuable opportunities and receive recommendations to maximise your procurement potential.
- Resilience and Agility: Adapt swiftly to supply chain disruptions and maintain business continuity.
- Seamless SAP Ariba Integration: Enjoy seamless integration with SAP Ariba solutions for a streamlined procurement experience.
How to Run Intelligence-Driven Category Management
To demonstrate the valuable impact of SAP Category Management on your organisation’s ability to implement intelligence-driven tools and processes, let us explore how this solution seamlessly aligns with the essential stages of the category management process.
Step 1: Defining Product and Service Categories
The first step in the process involves the establishment of logical and manageable categories for both products and services. Typically, this is done manually, but it can be challenging because managers often adopt diverse classification schemes and taxonomies, leading to potential inconsistencies and inaccuracies in categorisation.
With the implementation of SAP Category Management, a consolidated purchasing category taxonomy is provided. This unified scheme serves as a standard classification system for organising goods and services across the entire company. Doing so ensures that category definitions are harmonised and transparent, laying a robust foundation for analysing, planning, and executing category strategies.
Step 2: Acquiring Insights into Organisational Expenditure
Before crafting an effective category management strategy, gathering relevant data regarding past expenditures, pricing trends, supplier details, market dynamics, regulatory factors, and associated risks is crucial. Often, this information is scattered across various solutions, databases, reports, and external sources, presenting a challenge in terms of formats and accessibility.
Category managers invest a considerable amount of time in gathering and consolidating data to establish an accurate “as-is” representation of the category. This process typically involves manual data collection, resulting in hundreds of slides and spreadsheets. Unfortunately, due to the lengthy nature of this process, the data can quickly become outdated.
SAP Category Management offers a comprehensive 360-degree perspective of the category. Managers gain valuable insights at their fingertips by providing an instant overview of category expenditure, including subcategories, suppliers, and regional breakdowns. It incorporates in-depth category analytics and seamless integration with third-party market intelligence and benchmarks. This offers a seamless connection to the SAP Ariba Spend Analysis solution, enabling users to access enriched and categorised spend data.
Step 3: Strategise and Plan: Enhancing Category Management Efficiency
In the present day, category planning is a time-consuming and manual process, leading to its infrequent execution despite its critical importance. The complexity involved often results in missed opportunities to implement programs that could drive the organisation towards its objectives, such as cost savings and improved sustainability.
Key Challenges:
- Inconsistent Metrics: Category managers analyse data using various frameworks, leading to inconsistent metrics and varying qualities of analysis and resulting strategies.
- Diverse Opportunity Generation: Different teams employ various methods to identify opportunities for achieving category goals.
- Time-consuming Benefit Calculation: Calculating the benefits of specific strategies proves to be a time-consuming task.
- Isolated Spreadsheets: Category plans are often documented in isolated spreadsheets, making it difficult to effectively communicate and collaborate with stakeholders.
To address these challenges and enhance category management, SAP Category Management provides a comprehensive solution that guides managers through step-by-step strategy creation and planning. It empowers them to assess risks, review cost breakdowns, and position categories using tools like the Kraljic matrix.
Furthermore, the solution offers supplier categorisation, risk assessment, and contract information. Category managers can access and review details about category team members, company policies, business requirements, laws and regulations, and category guidelines, all stored centrally for easy access and collaboration.
Once the analysis is complete, managers can define value levers, such as tactics to achieve category goals, evaluate sourcing approaches, and perform a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis. All identified opportunities are then documented and stored centrally, facilitating efficient implementation and tracking of strategies.
With SAP Category Management, category planning becomes a streamlined and efficient process, empowering organisations to make better-informed decisions and maximise their strategic efforts towards desired outcomes.
Step 4: Streamlining Implementation, Monitoring, and Improvement
When category management relies on manual tasks alone, integrating the category plan with source-to-pay systems becomes arduous. Category managers find themselves having to manually input data into these systems to activate sourcing projects. This not only consumes valuable time but also makes it challenging to monitor the progress of category initiatives and quantify benefits and savings.
To address these challenges and foster knowledge sharing and efficient execution of category initiatives, SAP Category Management offers a comprehensive solution. By seamlessly integrating your category plan with source-to-pay processes and systems, it provides a centralised workbench equipped with a consolidated planning calendar, goal monitoring, and initiative status tracking. This integrated approach enables category managers to make data-driven decisions more swiftly.
The SAP Category Management solution goes a step further by identifying system-recommended opportunities. These suggestions consider factors like supplier fragmentation, impact assessment, price variances, tail spend, and supplier diversity. This functionality enhances the decision-making process and unlocks hidden potential within the category.
With the automatic transfer of information from SAP Category Management to SAP Ariba Sourcing, category managers can effortlessly convert initiatives into sourcing projects using the guided sourcing capability available in SAP Ariba Sourcing. Furthermore, access to category analytics and strategy-related documents empowers category managers with critical insights for informed decision-making and strategy refinement.
In the pursuit of cost management, compliance, and the establishment of sustainable and robust supply chains, organisations recognise the vital importance of focusing on strategic initiatives within the category management function. However, this endeavour requires liberating themselves from the limitations imposed by current manual processes.
SAP Category Management empowers organisations to digitalise their category management processes, enabling them to enhance their capabilities in devising, implementing, and monitoring category strategies.
