As procurement continues to evolve from a tactical to a strategic enterprise function, CPOs and other senior procurement leaders are being evaluated on their team’s strategic contributions to the success of the business.
Cost control and take-out remain as prime objectives, but procurement’s mission is increasingly seen as impacting both the top and bottom lines, with a direct connection to enterprise growth and competitiveness. How can you start meeting these intensified expectations — delivering impressive savings, yes, but also creating value that indicates progress toward organizational maturity?
GEP’s category management services not only help procurement teams in market-leading enterprises worldwide save more money, but also contribute value in ways that include improving supplier performance, mitigating supply risks, and driving innovation and continuous improvement.
The Power of Proactive
Dependable suppliers, good contractual terms — that’s the general “punch list.”
Changing business needs, compliance gaps and below-par supplier performance can all erode identified savings.
Proactive management is integral to ensure that suppliers and contracts deliver real savings and value. That’s the GEP approach to category management consulting. It gets you:
- Real-time market intelligence on suppliers and commodities
- Best-practice category and industry methodologies
- Precise category planning, encompassing forecasting and budgeting
- Supplier performance tracking
- Improved compliance
- Proactive contract reviews and renewals
- Decreased off-contract (maverick) purchasing and greater spend under management
- Live savings measurement and tracking – identified vs. realized
- Constant annual cost reductions
GEP SMART’s contract function provides us the means to analyze our contracts by type, scope and size. Now we can plan our category strategies more effectively.
GEP's Category Management Outsourcing Services:
Procurement leaders at Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises worldwide have relied on GEP’s category management outsourcing services to deliver higher savings, improve supplier performance, mitigate risks, and drive innovation at their enterprises.
Access to accurate information at the right moments is crucial in sourcing, and can give your business a significant competitive advantage. Not having it, on the other hand, is a good way to jeopardize the stability of your whole operation.
GEP’s sourcing specialists use custom-configured engagement models to provide market intelligence and key insights that help your team make critical decisions with conviction. Learn more about supply market intelligence from GEP.
A clear, solid process for planning and budgeting forms the base for opportunity assessment and risk management, which is especially vital for commodities like raw materials that are subject to unpredictable market factors.
GEP’s category management consultants and market intelligence teams support our clients’ budgeting processes by constantly tracking key markets, analyzing market trends and potential price variabilities. This enables stable, reliable planning for spending in every critical category, whether direct or indirect.
Getting a contract finalized is a long and laborious task — and the longer it drags on, the longer it takes your enterprise to actually realize the value secured by the negotiations. With each passing day, you lose out on more benefits and savings.
That’s where our contract specialists come in — they are experts at liaising with procurement and legal teams and working with vendors to speed up the process and get you the most favorable contractual terms. They can support the seamless execution of supply agreements, master agreements, statements of work and NDAs. Not only does this cut down the time needed to finalize a contract, it also serves to limit risk while allowing category managers to dedicate their resources on addressing greater spend.
And we don’t stop there — GEP’s contract support is ongoing; it includes everything from maintaining complete repositories, managing compliance, and keeping track of renewals, rebates and reporting. Learn more about GEP’s contract management services.
GEP SMART's contract management tools, purpose-built for procurement teams, simplify and automate the contracting and contract administration process.
The modern supply chain landscape is more intricate than ever and navigating it well requires highly developed expertise. Vendor dependence has increased with companies struggling to absorb, and recover from, supply chain failures without major setbacks. In this scenario, supplier performance is of utmost importance.
GEP helps enterprises manage suppliers effectively, with a laser focus on mitigating risk and boosting value. We blend together analytical prowess, process excellence and powerful technology in a stringent, comprehensive approach that gives you complete transparency of supplier operations. We reinforce supplier performance standards through an extensive set of metrics encompassing supplier onboarding, segmentation, analysis, reporting and improvement.
See how a streamlined, user-friendly, cloud-based platform like GEP SMART can help you monitor the performance of thousands of suppliers and get every bit of critical data for supplier performance management at your fingertips —talk to us today.
This may sound counterintuitive, but tail spend actually offers enterprises one of the largest incremental savings opportunities available. Even more surprisingly, a tally of individual spend on all suppliers in a tail just might reveal that the tail is the business’s biggest supplier.
The GEP approach to tail-spend management is based on battle-tested methodologies developed within real-world scenarios. Our world-class sourcing and transaction management capabilities put proven cost reduction practices into play to deliver sustainable results.
You can’t fix what you can’t control. And what cannot be measured cannot be controlled. And measurement is made incredibly difficult by myriad categories, subcategories, assumptions, and savings formulas — further complicated by limited influence over end users and limited view into contract compliance. You can easily see your savings evaporate by the point when goods and services are finally being purchased.
Savings and compliance tracking services from GEP give you access to an all-inclusive, fully modifiable procurement dashboard that gives you complete visibility into actual savings realized against the savings plans in place. It will also point to the reasons for noncompliance at a particular business unit, category, supplier or process level, not only enabling you to identify culprits and drivers of noncompliance, but to take remedial measures.
A big factor distinguishing GEP’s category management services from those of our competitors is our timeless, tireless commitment to continuous improvement and innovation.
At GEP, profound category experience, strategic sourcing best practices and process expertise meet advanced category management tools to implement sophisticated, category-specific cost-saving programs that significantly lower expenses and create immense value for our clients. Some of these include demand management, product/service rationalization, value engineering, transaction cost reduction, and low-cost country sourcing.
We also support our clients on specialized projects like transitioning to ecofriendly sourcing or identifying a new infusion of supply partners.
Industry-leading Category Management Consultants
GEP is home to some of the world’s most talented and highly successful procurement experts — many with the status of recognized thought leaders in their respective niches. Our category management consultants are commodities and materials specialists, super focused on the specific requirements and challenges of diverse global markets.
Knowledge sharing is a big part of what makes GEP a market leader – our category experts are always eager to exchange ideas, insights and experiences with their colleagues. This ongoing intelligence collection and sharing exercise creates a high degree of market and trend sensitivity that delivers uncommon client value.
Portfolio and Risk Management
For volatile commodities such as raw materials and energy, hedging — what, how much and for how long — poses some of the toughest questions before procurement managers.
As part of our category management consulting engagements, we work with clients to identify opportune times and hedge future contracts to secure better prices for their current and forthcoming requirements.
Additionally, these inputs and strategies form part of the contracts we negotiate on behalf of our clients by incorporating the right terms and conditions to protect our clients’ interests under unanticipated circumstances.
Why Choose Category Management Services From GEP?
Our market intelligence infrastructure is purpose-built for procurement:
- A wealth of in-house category experts
- Vast network of subject matter experts
- Over 35 million suppliers in our proprietary database
- Access to several third-party research resources
- Spend, savings and best-practice benchmarks from thousands of sourcing projects
- Rich repository of analytical tools and templates
