Question
Advanced Practitioner Corporate Award
Assessment 4
This assessment tests the learning outcomes and module content of:
Module 4: Developing People in Procurement and Supply Chain Management
Module5: Implementing Change in Procurement and Supply Chain Management
Task
You have been asked to lead the project team to implement a new category management strategy. Prepare a
report that demonstrates how you would approach the task, ensuring that you and your team have the
appropriate skills to successfully implement it.
Guidance for candidates
Your work should consist of 3,000 words.
Solution/Answer
1.0 Introduction
In the contemporary competitive business environment, procurement executives are working hard in ensuring they offer increased value to their enterprises beyond cost reductions through strategic category management. Adopting the definition of Kurtuluş and Toktay (2011), category management is a supplier process of managing categories as strategic business unities, producing enhanced business results by having a focus on the delivery to the clients. According to Gooner et al. (2011), a safe harnessing of supply-market power to enhance the creation of a competitive advantage is the mission of a global-oriented organization which is concealed by category management. This is the process affords a framework and set of practices adopted to optimally manag the supply categories to meet an entity goals and objectives. Despite a small number of modern organizations having this capability, the primary target to extract value from the supply base are the strategic sourcing strategies which were greatly pioneered in the early 1980’s and 90’s. As noted by Puranam et al. (2013), this was majorly adopted by the sourcing managers in rationalizing their suppliers, aggregating their buying power, driving down pricing and later improving their supplier performance against a contract. In the modern practice, category management aims at producing an interactive and collaborative business process where distributors and suppliers operate as partners to enable them in creating and managing consumer-oriented category plans. This report will focus on implementing a new category management strategy for Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC).
1.1 Organization Background and Selected Category Management
The company of focus is the Emirates National Oil Company (ENOC). According to ENOC (2017) this is a leading global oil and gas player which operates across the energy sector value chain. It is regarded as a wholly owned company of the Government of Dubai and has been in active practice since 1993. The level of the company procurement and supply chain management is evident by the company having more than 30 related subsidiaries actively involved in refining, lubricant blending, storage, aviation and retail. In this report, the category management of interest is the Automated data collection software to be installed in the company selected computers by a team where I am a leader. The rationale of this category management is attributed to the fact that ENOC has been losing days each month in manual input and checking of financial data from all the 30 related subsidiaries (ENOC, 2017). In this case, the outcome of the selected category management would be enhancing an acceleration of processes without necessarily compromising the accuracy of their operations. Also, the selected category management will ensure that the company performance is improved, risks of human error mitigated and hours saved in the manual work and lastly ensuring that their staff possesses an ideal focus on the more value-added tasks.
2.0 Key Enablers of the Category Management
The enablers of a category management facilitate management and exploitation of business conditions, supplier consolidation, supply economics and leveraging on the internal resources such as individuals, knowledge and expertise. In this case, to ensure a successful implementation of the identified category management, the enablers must be in existence to guide me as a leader and my team. They include the following;
2.1 Organization & Structure
Organization and structure is a critical factor in enhancing the success of the category management. This will be characterized by presence of a focused team with clearly defined responsibilities, authorities and accountability of the Automated data collection software procurement activity as shown in figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Organizational Behaviors
Source Summarized by the Study As a critical element of ensuring the success of the Automated…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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