The technique of grouping similar items into a single category, or business unit, and then focusing sourcing, branding, sales, and other retail operations on the category as a whole is known as category management.
Category Management is a strategic method in which firms divide their expenditure into sectors with similar or related items, allowing for streamlining and effectiveness.
One of the main goals of this approach is to promote the category’s benefits to consumers while eliminating bottlenecks and unnecessary competition among brands and suppliers within a category. For example, by integrating procurement activities under a single category rather than by each brand or supplier, this method can help merchants increase profitability on related products in a variety of ways.
Principles of category management
Category management produces the desired and productive outputs that satisfy business needs and add value to the company.
Employees must be adaptable across departments to complete the procedure. Organizations that use category management divide procurement into segments and operate cross-functionally on individual categories.
Maintaining good cross-functional teamwork requires full visibility of all steps that drive category management that is easily accessible to all components of an organization.
The entire concept of category management, as well as its ability to improve operational efficiencies, is based on obtaining relevant data when it’s needed. To regularly monitor their performance or advancement, products must be given data-driven space allocations.
Interactions and collaborations
Organizations can engage with suppliers, buyers, and other stakeholders to enable effective procurement to thrive through collaborative teamwork. It fosters a more cordial and productive interaction between services channels and clients.
Major benefits of Category Management
Consolidation and achieving savings through scale economies are two other major advantages of category management. Besides this, there are other benefits too and they are listed below.
The category management function’s purpose is to ensure that each category’s performance is optimized to its greatest potential, using a variety of techniques and strategies ranging from purchasing and supplier management to visual presentation and product sales management.
This ensures that products are not overlooked and that inventory returns are maximized to the greatest extent possible. As, each category is regarded as a separate business unit, with special attention paid to the many product Stock within that category.
It is also highly rewarding in terms of insights and helps to predict sales and profits of each category.
Category management also gives the retailer a lot of negotiating power when dealing with suppliers, allowing them to get better shipping and payment terms on top of the product cost savings.
It might be difficult to keep track of all sorts of expenses. However, with category management in place, it’s easy to keep track of what’s being bought and when. One of the advantages of category management in procurement is this. For corporations, improved expenditure control equals cheaper expenses and greater control.
When a firm works with a specific supplier, the supplier will work with the company to make sure that the firm gets exactly what they want. This means that there will be a greater emphasis on product quality and when they are delivered to the buyer. As a result, category management can be said to assure consistency and stability.
Buying in bulk allows a company to avoid making multiple purchases, which can be costly. Since the process isn’t repeated, this reduction in duplication saves time.
