Category owners pour significant time into stakeholder engagement, into gathering, cleansing and analyzing data, and into collecting business requirements while reading market dynamics, all to formulate the right category strategies.
But creating those strategies and communicating them well is only 50% of the job. The most impactful part is the preparation, execution of the defined strategies, and the reporting of the business value created. And that is exactly where most category owners run into challenges they can't overcome.
Strategy is only half the job
In our latest survey, in January 2024, category owners pointed to three challenges again and again:
- Lack of trust in the opportunities and the assessment, among stakeholders
- Relevant opportunities hidden by a complex data-infrastructure landscape
- External market dynamics that move faster than the plan
of identified opportunities are never executed and so never become business value.
Thankfully, category owners can now lean on recent advances in artificial intelligence. As Gartner puts it, procurement technology is evolving rapidly and changing how procurement will be executed in the future.
Imagine an augmented process
Picture a process where data analysis and visibility, opportunity assessment and validation, and the monitoring of execution are all supported by AI agents. That frees category owners to focus on what only they can do: strategy development, stakeholder alignment inside and outside the business, and recognizing business impact.
In this new world, a large portion of today's low-value activity is replaced by data-backed conversations with key stakeholders. Owners get time back to understand end-customer requirements and connect them all the way through to specification and potential innovation across the supplier base. It's the ultimate value delivery through category management, which until now has existed for only a handful of organizations. That no longer needs to be the case.
The Business Case Generator™
In January 2024 we launched the Business Case Generator™ to reinvent the Plan-to-Strategy (P2S) process for category owners. It replaces a tedious twelve-step process with just six, a 50% cut in cycle time, with AI agents doing the homework across every optimized step and asking only for human review and feedback.
Across all six steps, owners and stakeholders keep full visibility and can give feedback the AI agent learns and never forgets. Once a strategy is formulated and selected, the solution surfaces every relevant opportunity, weighing the supplier base, the category and sub-categories, and geography. External risk factors are folded in from the latest news and market dynamics around your suppliers, so the auto-generated business cases are thoroughly evaluated and adjusted before they ever enter the active pipeline.
And once those cases are in execution, the agents watch the trends on every opportunity and proactively tell the category owner, and only the relevant stakeholders, whether they're ahead, on plan, or behind, and why, before it happens.
The business impact
Category owners see stakeholder-alignment effort collapse from months to weeks to days, and surface materially more opportunity with a far higher execution yield.
"Procurement organizations that do not embrace AI technologies will find themselves at a cost and agility deficit compared to their competitors.", Gartner, Predicts 2024: CPOs Adjust to Technology's Impact on Procurement
What it changes for category owners
Execution stops leaking value
Close the gap on the 40%+ of opportunities that are identified but never executed, by building trust, visibility and monitoring into the process.
Alignment shrinks from months to days
Data-backed conversations replace endless data prep, so stakeholders align on evidence instead of debating the numbers.
Owners do the work only they can do
Strategy, stakeholder alignment, and connecting customer requirements back to the supplier base, the agents handle the homework.
This is the world where category management reaches its full potential, creating uninterrupted value from customer requirements all the way to the supplier base. Let us show you what it looks like on your own spend.