How A Procurement Category Management Company Can Increase Your Profits

Part of ensuring actionable market intelligence is having the ability to track the changes in procurement categories. Technological advancements and globalisation are factors that are causing supplier business models and procurement categories to rapidly evolve, resulting in category managers needing a more proactive approach to ensure proper category planning that is supported by actionable market intelligence. Hiring a procurement management company can be helpful when you need access timely and comprehensive insights when creating better sourcing strategies. Working with a procurement category management company can increase your profit through the following ways:

 

• Increased productivity – Category intelligence solutions are essential when updating category developments. That way, you can easily find early warning signs that may indicate supply chain disruptions and prevent or minimise their chances of occurring. A procurement category management company can help prevent disruptions from indirect procurement categories (i.e. logistics, facilities, HR, IT, and finance) by helping you monitor and understand them well. 

• Access to expertise – Procurement category management companies maintain a secondary research database of thousands of online sources. Moreover, they can gather expert opinion and on-ground insights, therefore, enabling their in-house analyst teams to monitor category best practices and trends, and produce custom market reports for your different procurement categories. Insights are essential critical inputs when developing strategies for indirect and direct procurement categories.
  
  
• Category strategy development – By hiring a procurement category management company, you can work with highly experienced analysts and industry experts who can help your category managers understand the landscape of the supply market. That way, they can create effective category plans. The company can help your staff discover niche and new suppliers, too.

  Category intelligence – Upon the development of a category plan and sourcing strategy, category managers must be able to closely monitor all factors that can impact them. These factors include new players, pricing changes, regulatory changes, technological developments, and macroeconomic changes. A procurement category management company can serve as an extension of your buying organisation that can monitor all relevant developments across your indirect and direct procurement categories. That way, you can easily acquire actionable insights.