Abstract/Summary

Category management was introduced as the key procurement process more than 30 years ago. It has been widely accepted that teams need a common process and toolkit for creating category strategies and they need to be trained in it. However, we observed that beyond this there was very little consistency in the way that organisations created an environment for category management to flourish. Best practices and standards had not been established and consequently results were variable. For many organisations, although implementation had been attempted numerous times, the procurement teams remained focused on strategic sourcing rather than category management. Our intention with the research was to create the missing standards for category management implementation, and explore evidence used in creating a business case for investment.