Improving business outcomes with intelligent category management

In times of uncertainty, category management is becoming more essential to meeting spend management goals. By automating and streamlining category management processes, you can focus more on strategy and value realization to increase productivity, savings, and profits. Built on SAP Business Technology Platform, the SAP Ariba Category Management software solution digitalizes and streamlines the development, execution, and monitoring of category strategies for faster, more efficient category management in procurement.

• Higher cost savings through system-based actionable insights
• Reduced time spent on data gathering, analysis, and preparation
• Enriched and categorized spend data
• Increased time for strategizing and initiative execution

Key benefits

Make better decisions and increase cost savings

Gain in-depth access to actionable insights to help form a cohesive category management strategy and increase sourcing savings on direct and indirect spend.

Spend more time on strategy and value creation

Free up resources by replacing manual, offline, and inconsistent processes with automated, streamlined category strategy creation and management.

Create consistent category management frameworks

Use a consolidated category taxonomy for purchasing that provides a uniform, enterprise-wide framework for classifying goods and services.

Key features

Simplified creation of category spend profiles

• Enable users to create comprehensive category 360 profiles
• Create logical and manageable product and service categories using a purchasing category taxonomy for mapping to existing classifications
• Provide instant views into category spend and suppliers based on classified and enriched data

Guided process for strategy and plan development

• Provide industry standards-based guided strategy frameworks and system-recommended opportunities
• Follow a step-by-step strategy development process that uses category segmentation and customizations
• Use tools for creating purchasing strategies based on the Kraljic matrix for segmenting categories

Outcome monitoring and execution

• Cascade opportunities for effective execution while monitoring KPI performance
• Use built-in analysis to identify, create, and monitor opportunities for category-specific goals
• Get system-recommended opportunities based on supplier fragmentation, impact, price variances, tail spend, and supplier diversity