Wednesday 2 March 2016

Category Intelligence in Procurement – What Is It and What You Need To Know

Category intelligence solutions are crucial to procurement departments. They deal with actionable market intelligence for key procurement categories to help category managers make better category strategies. Likewise, category intelligence can help the managers identify the best practices that allow the business keep to up with the ever-changing category landscape. This way, you can rely on comprehensive and critical information that can ensure the sustainability of the supply chain, improve supplier relationships, and track the changes in procurement categories.

Suppliers and procurement categories must be able to keep up with technological advancements, globalisation, and other developments that can affect the supply chain. Hence, it is crucial for category managers to approach category planning in a pro-active manner, basing crucial decisions on actionable market intelligence. Timely and comprehensive insights are valuable to category managers as these enable to them to develop effective strategies for sourcing. Moreover, these professionals must be constantly updated on category developments to determine early warning signs of risks and reduce disruptions in the supply chain.

A category intelligence solutions provider maintains a secondary research database with thousands of online sources. Together with expert opinion and the ability to obtain on-ground insights, an experienced analyst team can help category managers track trends, determine the best practices, and come up with bespoke market reports regarding category leads. This way, category managers can develop a category strategy and save time in the process.

Seasoned analysts and industry experts will assist category managers in determining and understanding the supply market and create effective category plans. Likewise, they can help identify new and niche suppliers and market trends to help them plan in advance. Category managers may learn category-specific best practices from category management specialists, too, and this will be helpful if they are looking to expand or improve their procurement practice.