Category Management Services

Access to accurate information at the right time is crucial in sourcing and can give your business a significant competitive advantage. Not having it can jeopardize the stability of your operations. GEP’s sourcing specialists use custom-configured engagement models to provide market intelligence and key insights to help make critical decisions. Learn more about supply market intelligence from GEP.

A clear process for planning and budgeting forms the base for opportunity assessment and risk management, which is vital for raw materials subject to unpredictable market factors. GEP’s category management consultants and market intelligence teams support our clients’ budgeting processes by tracking key markets, analyzing trends and potential price variabilities. This enables reliable planning for spend across all direct and indirect categories.

Getting a contract finalized is a long, laborious task. 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. This not only cuts down the time needed to finalize a contract but also limits risk while allowing category managers to focus 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.

GEP helps enterprises manage suppliers effectively, with a laser focus on mitigating risk and boosting value. We combine 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 offers enterprises one of the largest incremental savings opportunities. 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.

GEP’s 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. 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. 

Savings and compliance tracking services from GEP give you access to an all-inclusive, fully modifiable procurement dashboard that gives you visibility into actual savings realized against the savings plans. It also points to the reasons for noncompliance in a particular business unit, category, supplier or process level, enabling you to identify culprits and drivers of noncompliance and take remedial measures. 
 

A big factor that distinguishes GEP’s category management services 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.