ARCBLUE SERVICES

Category Strategy

Unlock real value through strategic Category Management

Strategic Category Management represents a significant opportunity for procurement teams to unlock real value.

In our experience, taking a holistic, cross-organisational approach to managing a category of spend can often be the key to taking step change in delivering value. Most organisations acknowledge the potential opportunity but struggle to implement the category management approach.

At ArcBlue, we are passionate about delivering value through a strategic approach to procurement – and category management is central to this philosophy.

To get the most value from Category Management, it is important that we deliver in the following areas:

Clear process to guide teams to an agreed category strategy
Procurement acting as ‘internal consultants’ to facilitate the process
Fact based category analysis to drive decision making
Skilled practitioners following consistent methodology
Engaged stakeholders fully bought in to the concept and the resulting strategies

The ArcBlue CATalyst Program delivers an out-of-the-box toolkit to embed Category Strategies across your organisation:

Implementation Options

We can deliver CATalyst in two ways. Both options are designed to strengthen and coach participants to build best practice category strategies.

Option 1: Set-up Only

Training and supporting your team to facilitate the CATalyst process

ArcBlue will provide CATalyst training to the procurement team and licence the program methodology.

This tailored training program will equip participants with advanced category strategy techniques, the ability to facilitate stakeholder workshops and generate and cultivate options.

Option 2: Set-up plus facilitated process to embed learnings

ArcBlue consultant facilitates the process on behalf of the client working with internal team members

This option is a facilitated process that focuses on driving out the business needs and uses cross functional teams to deliver sustainable category opportunities.

This approach works effectively with Business Units and ensures that Category Strategies are developed to be sustainable with genuine stakeholder buy-in.

Experience the benefits of the ArcBlue CATalyst Program

Increased speed of developing category strategies
Alignment of category and corporate objectives
Genuine stakeholder buy-in
The ongoing delivery of value
Innovation encouraged through category strategy
A strategic context for local procurement decision-making

Need to deliver sustainable benefits through improved Category Management?

The ArcBlue CATalyst Program is an agile method designed for procurement teams to facilitate stakeholders through the development of robust supply solutions and category strategies.