Question:

Task

You are required to select an example of a category of procurement or a product, service or works bought by your organisation and create a category plan.  This should include an implementation plan which also identifies the challenges in implementing your plan and your strategies for mitigating the challenges.

Guidance for candidates

Your work should consist of 3,000 words. Your assignment should include the assignment title, your candidate number and word count on the front cover, followed by contents page, executive summary, conclusions, recommendations, references and a bibliography. Any source materials such as web sites, company reports, indices, market data, articles, journals or texts should be listed in your references or bibliography in accordance with a recognised referencing system. Your assignment submission should be word processed with a minimum font size 12pt and 1.5 or double line spacing. Refer to the Assignment Guidance document for more information.

Answer/Solution:

1.0 Introduction

Category planning is identified as a process of developing a category plan aligned to the customers’ business objectives with a strategic approach of value maximization, risks reduction and effective management of supply of goods and services.  According to CIPS (2013), category planning is supposed to be aligned with the business objectives and its development with key customer stakeholders. Additionally, successful category plans are supposed to be influencing the sourcing strategies and different contract management initiatives. From a general perspective, O’brien (2019) defines category management as a supplier process of managing the categories as strategic business units, producing enhanced business results by having a focus on customer’s delivery. As shown in figure 1, category management is categorized into category planning, sourcing, and supplier management.

Figure 1: Planning Fitness in the Category Management In most organisations, category planning is implemented by sourcing managers to rationalize their suppliers, buying power aggregation, driving down pricing and ultimately improving their supplier performance against their contract. This is done to produce an interactive and collaborative business process where the distributors and suppliers operate as partners for enabling their creation and management of customer-oriented category plans. Similarly, in the category planning, the best practice is alignment with customer business plans, procurement targets and customer stakeholder strategies. Prior to the category planning, diagnostics is implemented for developing category profile……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Please contact our team to receive guidance, support and tutorial services on this assessment in full based on your organisation background and any instruction

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