An embedded approach is a partnership approach

Having begun its category management journey some years back, the procurement team at Nordea has arrived at a stage where they have ceased to refer to category management as a separate discipline, such is the extent of its embedment. Rather, the conversation today leans towards Partnership.

“A business partner,” Morten says, “is someone who can lead and drive business outcomes for the stakeholder. This goes deeper than just supporting them, and for us it is borne out of time invested in engaging, listening, understanding and applying relevant expertise that allows us to challenge – something that adds value to agreements rather than simply executing them.”

To arrive at this point, they went from a text-book style model of separate category management teams (for indirect or banking-specific categories for example) to a single team which now embraces a partnership approach. “We found that time spent on routine category management exercises like a certain schedule of category plans, market analysis, spend analysis, contract landscape analysis and industry trends, while important for us, yielded technical input from the stakeholders, but not the strategic input to projects we wanted.”

A structural change was needed. While the current tactical approach facilitated an entry point to a pipeline of projects, a new partnership approach would help them obtain their financial KPIs. That would rely on a build-up of credibility. And to gain that credibility they needed to get to know the business functions’ priorities, the question was …

How to engage with the business and its budget holders?

Getting to understand the agenda and the mechanics of a business area comes from working in projects rather than holding status meetings.

“Once you are able to be part of large projects, it follows that you build relationships. And once you are able to demonstrate your expertise and knowledge (which is where your traditional category management analyses come into play) then you will gain the trust to work side-by-side with the stakeholders. The ‘big ticket’ contracts need sourcing and negotiating skills to be completed, and close advisors to help execute them. That’s where our value is added.”

“This doesn’t mean that we are not following a category management approach, on the contrary, we are taking the relevant components of Category Management and applying them where it makes most sense and not least when it makes sense to do so in a financial services environment. When a window of opportunity arises, which might be anything from business process outsourcing to the use of a new technology, we are ready to have all hands-on deck. Then we will take a SWAT team approach to ensure success for the business area.”

A classic approach to category management might be more relevant to the production industry for example, where raw materials or components are being sourced and whose prices are market-dependent and where there’s a supply chain to manage. But the financial services sector doesn’t always fit into a tangible mould. “We are buying services that are integrated into business processes. So, you have to be able to adapt the category management concepts to suit your business or service.”

“You get the stakeholder buy-in by proving that you can add value. When you have proved yourself you don’t need a mandate. To earn a seat at the table, for us, is to be involved in the large, complex sourcing projects where we can use our negotiation and advisory skills and thus gain stakeholder respect. The key stakeholder is more likely to want to interact with the sourcing manager who has been involved in the whole negotiation and understands the specified requirements. So in our model, sourcing and category management must go hand in hand to add value.”

So the procurement team has developed a very agile approach which enables them to respond to any window of opportunity. Says Morten: “Sometimes a category strategy is what is required to advance a specific area, but it then requires full attention from me and my management team to create the buy-in from senior leadership in the business areas. And sometimes there is little appetite in the business areas to make changes to the supplier base, because their focus is elsewhere.”

“In our environment it is not a necessity to have deep expertise in every possible category at all times. But having this agile approach, with pockets of expertise and a team that deep dives into the businesses, works for us and helps us achieve credibility with stakeholders.”

What do the stakeholders perceive as value?

Value can mean different things to different people and departments, but according to Morten:

“Firstly there’s a big value add in bringing a mature sourcing approach to the table, which will yield a better commercial output. This means the structure and methods to do the relevant analysis, sourcing strategies, and not least negotiation. This is where we have the ability to lead because it’s a professionalism not usually in abundance in the business areas.”

“Secondly, the regulatory landscape has become top of mind for everyone in the industry, so there’s a bigger need for the business to involve us in the jungle that is risk and compliance. When we have been involved, stakeholders can rely on the fact that all relevant risk and compliance requirements have been met. Risk management is a special skill set, and we have to internalise and have a deep understanding of the risk that we have to manage to be able to navigate all requirements smoothly.”

“Thirdly, long-term strategic planning for opportunity identification and capacity optimisation is valued. The cadence for these discussions is typically quarterly and we run a 12- to 18-month rolling pipeline. This means we have all strategic discussions within one team, which learns the business’s priorities and is separate from the operational side. This way we keep on top of things like expiring agreements or renegotiations so that we can plan for them in advance.”

At the end of the day …

The core of procurement is to enable the best business outcomes by matching the business requirements with the best the supplier market can offer. “But, at the end of the day,” concludes Morten, “what really matters is that we communicate regularly with the business to understand their requirements and add the value that they cannot.”

As this survey reveals, procurement teams that have embedded a cross-functional way of working with budget holders and technical stakeholders (the ‘Leaders’) are those whose relationships have evolved to consider business objectives and category targets a joint responsibility.

Strategic category management is a way of thinking

Category management is a primary channel to leverage that buying power. “For us,” Pamela explains, “it encompasses more than sourcing; we see sourcing as a series of events that come from category management. Category management is the larger, more strategic approach to how we think about the entire range of goods and services in a category. It’s ultimately about how we think across the whole organisation in terms of supplier relationships, payment terms, how many suppliers we need, etc. So, we see the category structure through various lenses, led by category managers who report into category families. While it is the contract leads globally who are executing on behalf of the categories, it is the category managers who are responsible for strategy, approach and how we go to market.”

“What’s important in our approach,” adds George McGlamery, Commercial Chief, “is that we consider these category manager positions as leadership roles, so they have global responsibilities and input on various go-to-market strategies, like IT or wells services, which helps us quickly implement a more complete set of commercial levers no matter the operating site. Thus the category managers can be working across all geographies, with operations in about 60 or 70 countries.”

Visibility breeds credibility

One of the deliverables of the transformation programme was to provide absolute clarity on the requirements of the category families versus the contract leads. “This is important,” says Pamela, “because without clearly defined roles and accountabilities upfront, you can end up with country-level activities that aren’t aligned with the overall business strategy, leading to less control.

“A strategy is not something that lives in your head or on your C drive, it’s something very comprehensive, with minimum requirements. So this ‘clarity’ includes understanding where strategies need to be created, how often they are refreshed, how they map to business requirements, and so on. Then we have a set of subject matter experts in place, like senior technical professionals, who peer review the category strategies and score them to make sure they meet the absolute minimum criteria for what good looks like. And this level of professionalism is hugely impactful.”

What good looks like was directed by the category management system they put in place. Using CAPS (Center for Advanced Procurement Studies in North America) they went “back to basics” and used their learnings to identify a systematic process which defines what they expect from end-to-end Category Management.

“People found it a really useful tool since it helped them better understand what our expectations were, like what makes a good category strategy and what are the outputs expected from it,” Pamela explains. “It meant the higher expectations placed on them, in terms of cost-reduction or cost-avoidance targets, were made clear from the Category Management System. Applying that to execute supplier and contract analysis, market analysis or should-cost modelling, gives them insights for better outcomes. So when you give someone lofty goals, but you also give them guidance upstream on how to achieve them, then that galvanises support.”

“And through formalisation,” explains George, “we get deeper visibility of everything we leverage. At the end of the day we are a solutions business, so credibility is hugely important to us. The more transparent we are, the more our stakeholders can see how we work, the more credibility we have, and the more they trust us to operate independently. Further, formalising what we do, not only helps them understand our business, but enables them to contribute to it, giving us a full solution.”

Talent is an important element of the strategy

“In a commodity business like ours,” says Pamela, “we have to make sure we get the best prices so we can be successful in a very competitive marketplace. And I think people see our category approach as a way to unlock that, but it requires talent.”

The skills required of a Category Manager are very different from those of a Contract Lead. Pamela believes that if you give people the tools needed to self-assess and tell them where they are in their journey, and provide them with the training they need, you can discover who is best suited to strategy and who is best suited to lead roles. “But whichever that is,” she emphasises, “the more tactical roles are just as valuable as the strategic ones. Our aim is to help people understand the importance of having the right mix of talent and that skills can be transferred from one category to another.”

Segmenting the biggest deals and then pairing developing staff with more experienced mentors to carry out these major negotiations helps instil commercial principles, build commercial skills and improve confidence, better enabling the movement of talent from one deal to another, regardless of category. “And we can build that collective competency across the entire category board,” says Pamela. “The process of moving talent to your biggest and highest priorities is a really good output of our strategy; it means we are ready to mobilise resource from across the categories to where they are most needed.”

Cross-organisational alignment

Of course, it’s important that any transformation aligns with what the organisation wants to do, and you have to be able to show the business that category management is delivering value.

Being an Enterprise Process Owner during the business’ own transformation has given Pamela an opportunity to communicate outcomes and to be part of decisions on go-to-market strategies and projects. But with authority comes the responsibility to implement those decisions. Again, you need the right people and talent for that.

To improve the talent pool, Pamela introduced skills self-assessment and has senior leaders validate those skills and create a training roadmap. They also provide procurement-specific training (on negotiations, on setting up contract terms, on influencing, etc.) to upskill everyone.

“We are quickly heading in a direction where we can share resources with other commercial functions as people’s depth of understanding grows, so we can carry out commercial work all over the corporation. In Sales, for example, the experience and skills needed for business development activities are very similar to ours. Likewise, a lot of the experience acquired in the sales environment is very transferrable to purchasing. Deep knowledge gained by marketing and selling chemical products for example is very transferrable to the category side.

What it takes to make category management successful

What it takes to make category management successful According to Pamela, to make category management successful you have to really believe in what you are trying to do. “You can’t achieve what’s possible by limiting yourself,” Pamela says. “You have to believe in setting big targets, like working across the organisation. We originally thought would be too hard, because ExxonMobil was traditionally very siloed with lots of different companies. But now that we know we can deliver good things for the company, we are able to believe in our capabilities.”

On the more tactical side, Pamela is passionate about data and systems. “You need good data for everything,” she says. “For example, we have nine different instances of our ERP system and pulling data from multiple different systems is always hard. So the data transformation project that we have under way right now, replacing our business systems and ultimately modernising our processes, is going to be a huge enabler for our future.”

Digitalisation will only increase the impact of category management

While the spend management technology providers are developing their product suites of the future with category management workflow in mind, teams like Pamela’s can help frame their offerings by advising on the needs of the industry. “What we want is to be able to connect everything from spend tools, category insights, contracting levers and all kinds of KPIs into a full end-to-end category management approach that you can only do well if you have a system in place that formalises it, gives you insights you can pull directly out of the system and eliminates all the manual labour we use today.

“If you’re going to start using the power of technology, it’s got to come through a platform using machine learning to quickly get to what you want, and then using AI to get to market even faster. But there’s no point going to market without the right insights or data in the first place. And one of the big use cases I see for AI in category management is the ability to ask the chatbot, or whichever form the LLM takes, to give you details on your goods and services spend over a certain amount of time, including out of contract, and prepare a set of commercial levers based on those insights. If you ask the machine all the right questions, you can map the answers with your category strategy, and that will make the buyer of the future incredibly powerful.”

Where category management fits in

Sam is aware of what needs to change in order for Commercial to be positioned as a directorate of strategic leaders – a transition is required to effect the vision. “With this amount of annual spend,” she says, “we need to, and should, have a much louder voice around the table. We aim to achieve that by looking strategically at how our operations are carried out, including those by contractors, and working more closely and strategically with our suppliers and the businesses to help shape their strategies. Category management is a big part of that agenda.”

At the very heart of this, for Sam, is both the capacity and the capability of the people doing their jobs, and of the procurement profession generally. “My observations over the years are that many people spend their time operating the mechanics of procurement, being transactional, and my aim is to get that time and resource back by operating more efficiently – by employing category management. I believe a category management approach will massively drive benefits for the business and for the people within it.”

While a commercial team by nature has lots of expertise in procurement regulation and legislation, it’s essential for them to understand their markets just as well. And a conjoined approach alongside technology, Sam believes, can help them to be more streamlined, quicker, and to think more strategically.

“I think the implementation of category management is really a natural progression towards this vision – it’s not new, it’s something that’s been around for a very long time.”

As a leader, Sam can see ahead to what ‘good looks like.’ She’s seen the movie before. She successfully implemented category management at Crown Commercial Service, and is now busy getting her team on board to do the same.

Getting over the fear-of-the-unknown hurdle

“Naturally, there’s a lot of frightened people,” Sam explains, “because being strategic means leaving the comfort zone of how we’ve always done things. So we need to lead a cultural change in the way we engage with our markets, and we will be automating a significant amount of what we do. But that doesn’t mean less people – a myth that must be dispelled – it means people with augmented skill sets.

“Yet this is where we encounter some resistance, not just in the commercial teams, but in the business teams as well, because it means change. The change is not just about the principles of category management, it’s about people too.

“How we conquer the fear element is a million-dollar question. And it revolves around time and readiness. We need to support and enable people on this journey and work alongside them, as with all change, this can bring positive and negative thoughts.”

How do you achieve readiness?

“A leader needs to have earned respect and trust,” Sam says. “You cannot come into a change management role with a list of to-do’s and demands. That results in chaos.

“You must be aware that people fear change, even if they won’t articulate it – they show it in their resistance. But they will follow you if they believe it is the right thing to do – the right direction. And it’s the leader’s job to communicate that, to help them understand that in fact strategic thinking about how you are going to deliver something, and avoid any problems along the way, is more productive than the transactional box checking and button pressing. A non-strategic approach is massively costly and doesn’t reap the benefits we could be getting from our suppliers.

“On that point – also educating some of the supplies on the benefits of strategic working is another hurdle … but that’s another story.
“The other challenge is getting all of the leaders in that space. How you gain their trust is through stability and consistency in your messaging. You need to stay firm that this is not a passing change but a need to continually improve. The key is, you take everyone along with you. It’s important to listen to concerns, but also to deal with them, move on and get to a stage where you are ready for your CatMan journey.” So you need resilient leaders among your ambassadors, and a strong collective leadership message.

And this is where training comes in …

“It does take a lot of coaching,” says Sam. “We are ‘on the change curve’ at the moment, so it’s not going to be easy. Changing the hearts and minds of people is hard, so stakeholder management is important. If change management is a degree-level skill in the private sector, it’s a Ph.D. in the public sector. It takes perseverance, it takes resilience, and it takes training. And I think where other attempts at CatMan have failed, it’s because they haven’t put enough focus on those points.”

The CatMan structure and organisation

How Sam intends to organise the CatMan approach is another big part of the ‘readiness’ equation. “We have a portfolio of big projects,” Sam explains. “Some impact external spend, so you could categorise them horizontally across all programmes.

“The way we are structured at the moment is with a DDaT, commercial and operations director, and I will soon be hiring a strategic category director too. That shows the seriousness of our intentions. It’s a really important leadership role because that person will be the change catalyst. And because, for example, about 45% of spend is on DDaT, I’m going to have a business partner in our strategic category team who will deal with that business and own it end to end, including the customer part. And it’s my job to make sure that person is a true business partner who will own business problems and keep them until they are solved.”

Sam aims to turn the Target Operating Model completely on its head, and actually change that role. “So we’ll have people with strategic categories, the specialists, for example in professional services. And operationally there will be the business partner team as the front door. But the engine behind all of that will be strategic category management.

“I see the strategic team being focused on strategy and the operational team underneath connecting well in the delivery of non-category spend alongside contract management. And we are working on a strategic category view. Lessons learned from doing this previously tell me that you have to keep a strong grip on the category and drive it – it doesn’t just happen. You have to turn it into best practice then mirror that across categories. But the two must stay linked.

“My big question at the moment is: do we have dedicated people or do we have a pool of specialists that work horizontally? Whichever, you need a workforce management process to allow that, to move away from only controlling what’s in your direct line – another shift that must be managed.

“What our structure will look like is still in the making, but it will happen, and across categories there will be holistic buying with category management touching every part of it.”

Ultimately, what does good look like?

For Sam, category management will bring not just a commercial, but a multi-disciplinary skill set. “My vision is that we can all sit around a virtual table, discussing and understanding market movements and delivering to a common goal. So that is what good typically looks like to me.

“It will require project management to bring everyone on board, and fortunately within The Home Office we do have that skill, and we have the right people to help drive this, where category strategies can align with delivering wider goals. For example, we have a two-year rolling plan that leads to a 2030 vision for Commercial and how category management fits within that.

“Above all, we must have a plan for whatever our government is going to be facing – no one knows what the future holds. But we do know that if we concentrate on the right strategy, tools and skillsets we can build the stability that will gear us up for whatever ministerial priorities the future brings.”

Category management is structured to deliver across the organisation

Category management is very much part of a wider, more holistic transformation programme within the NHS rather than being viewed through a single lens.

“This is deliberate,” says Jacqui, “we see everything we do within buying at the NHS ultimately impacting and delivering effective category management. This is important, because to succeed in transforming to an efficient and effective function, you need to look at the entire procurement process and you need to look at delivery. From that perspective comes world-class expertise in category management.”

With 4,000 people buying in a very federated model, The Central Commercial Function, run out of NHS England, brings them all together. It has a number of key service-operated offerings: Commercial Best Practice, Technology and Data, Architecture, Strategy, Governance, Assurance and Process, People and Community, Commercial Strategies, Sustainability and Innovation, Sourcing, Supplier, Category and Contract Management, with a category management approach common throughout.

The recently published Strategic Framework for NHS Commercial covers commercial ambitions and objectives for the next five years. Looking realistically at the NHS and the health spend, it marks a real step change in the way NHS Commercial is moving forward. The vision of that Strategic Framework is to be globally renowned as a commercial function in healthcare, supporting the NHS to deliver world-class patient care and outcomes.

“It’s about driving collaboration across commercial teams so that together we can deliver on NHS priorities, on what we’ve committed to as a profession, while keeping the patient at the heart of everything we do, on leveraging the NHS collective buying power to ensure the best value for money and on providing clear, consistent guidance on how suppliers contract with the NHS. Through this model we’ll raise overall productivity and efficiency above the historical average, and seek delivery on commitments outlined in the NHS long-term plan.”
This strategic framework will be used as a centrally-driven blueprint for supply chain transformation around four key themes:

People: Attracting the best and most diverse commercial talents and connecting commercial professionals to one another.

Digital: Using data as a strategic asset and using its insights to create the greatest value and public trust through greater transparency.

How we work: Simplifying and speeding up the procurement process, removing the unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy and embedding commercial standards and best practice into day-to-day working. Leveraging buying power at scale to strengthen relationships with the supply chain for better patient outcomes.

Influence and scale: Leveraging influence and scale to foster healthy supply markets, develop and shape the market, unlock benefits from innovation, and deliver wider social value and economic benefits through procurement.

“And effective category management is the golden thread that runs throughout the entire strategic framework,” she explains.
The central resources are connected to leverage categories in different ways. Expanding that to local deployment is all about implementation.

Top capabilities for implementation

“Our teams consist of brilliant commercial people with category expertise. The categories we tackle are wide, anything from drugs and clinical consumables through to transport and estates, the list is long as there is almost nothing the NHS doesn’t buy. So we are launching playbooks, offering training and putting the right governance in place for effective category management. And we’re identifying where the particular category skills lie within our in our commercial teams.”

In terms of category management, top capabilities include data and supply market analysis, and influencing and trust-building skills. “What’s really fabulous about our industry is the breadth of skillsets we have, as negotiator, salesperson, influencer or other — as well as knowing the law and understanding process.”

The Strategic Framework brings together the whole commercial community and all those skillsets and gives them a seat and voice at the table. The interventions contained within will be delivered across the NHS by areas that have exemplary skills in buying certain categories.

“In this way, we share our skills and experience and maybe even buy on each other’s behalf,” she explains. “This is important as we consider how we are going to deliver category management and category interventions. We look at where the best practice is and make sure they have a seat at the table with us, like Crown Commercial Service, which delivers common goods and services across the NHS, and NHS Supply Chain, which delivers medical devices and consumables as a centralised core function.

“The strategy isn’t about creating centralised, nationalised buying, it’s about collaboration and finding the most effective and most innovative ways to buy through a commercial procurement community.”

Innovations that complement category management

Other innovations complement the framework initiatives and show how category management is seen within the context of a variety of commercial activities, rather than a standalone operation.

Part of the commercial efficiency initiatives include the Framework Accreditation programme. When reviewing the buying frameworks used by the NHS, Jacqui uncovered more than 1,200 frameworks with variations in product cost and quality. This made it difficult for the NHS to decipher which frameworks offered the best value for money, was a poor use of time and resource for the commercial teams, and left suppliers unsure about which framework they should be on.

Being passionate about innovation, especially within the SME marketplace, she wanted to simplify how their frameworks run across the NHS to make it easier for smaller firms. “While it can be easy for the big strategic players to be on multiple frameworks, that’s not the case for SMEs,” she says.

The ambition of a Framework Accreditation program would reduce those inefficiencies and enable the NHS to further leverage scale and national pricing. “We spent a lot of time looking at the data to identify framework hosts,” she explained. “NHS commercial teams will now buy only from accredited framework hosts. This removes duplication and makes the landscape more level to navigate, leading to better value. We will then look at those frameworks by category, develop a framework category taxonomy and generate the standards needed to undertake that category-level framework. The estimated savings, as a result of having better standardised frameworks is projected at £100 million over the project period.

“The point is,” she says, “you can make significant savings just by getting a grip on the categories in your frameworks.”
But, as with all initiatives, you have to get buy-in …

It’s all about data

Jacqui explains: “We have been implementing an end-to-end procurement solution across all commercial teams. For the first time in NHS history, we have a full view of what we spend, where we spend it and with whom. Now, this is really exciting, because as a result of that data I’m able to look at variations in cost and in what’s being delivered by the same supplier. Our size means we have suppliers that might have hundreds of different contracts with each Trust or primary care provider. So we’ve been able to look at that holistically.

“When you are able to articulate that data to the CFO and stakeholder landscape, when you can explain how we spend the money, and where the inefficiencies are, and what we need to do about it, that’s how you get the buy in,” she says.

The same applies to category interventions.

One example is the work Jacqui and team carried out on stents. The quantities and types being bought varied greatly. Being able to show that data to the clinicians, and get their clinical lens on it, meant they could bake their informed perspectives into the category strategy.

All stakeholder parties that NHS Commercial interacts with, including category teams, are involved to get that wider business requirement perspective, from the multiple trade bodies of the Cabinet Office, through to the doctors and consultants themselves. “By consulting and involving everyone is how we form our category strategies for each of our products,” she says.

Engagement is also key

“When we launched the Strategic Framework, we asked the community to adopt this blueprint as their direction of travel for commercial, which is important when you’re looking at that entire stakeholder landscape. But we had to structure an engagement program, which included running regular national procurement forums. Now, each integrated care system (ICS) has a dedicated procurement lead which may have multiple Trusts under them. Getting those ICS procurement leads into a room with representatives from right across central government means we can collectively and collaboratively look at that whole stakeholder engagement. They discuss face-to-face the priorities, challenges, categories, innovations, and so on with their peers and their teams.

“So I really see it as my job to widen the stakeholder net and engagement with the NHS. This whole programme of engagement keeps NHS Commercial up the agenda, because it’s a huge volume of spend, and people should be aware of how we are managing it.”

Of course how and where money is being spent has long been a topic of interest for the business. But Jacqui has seen a shift in how it’s represented. “We are now actually talking about the NHS as a whole: how we can leverage that spend, how we can shape innovation, how we can create new markets, how we use NHS commercial power to deliver better patient outcomes and for the greater good – and category management is a key part of those ambitions.”

It all needs change management

Change management is essential for all transformation, but there needs also to be a change in the mindset of the people developing the categories, since having clinical representatives on the team is a leap forward in what and how they buy.

How they drive this change is by validating a plan, then delivering these nationally-led category interventions for the prioritised spend.

One example lies in the energy category.

“Price hikes have been painful for everyone,” says Jacqui, “and they hit the NHS hard. So it was logical to look into how we actually buy energy. Again, we got all stakeholders in a room and explained the position. We had over 200 energy contracts in place across the country, all under different agreements, all with varying value and purchasing strategies. When we started looking at the numbers, and the opportunities, we collectively agreed that the way that we bought energy was not efficient. This became one of our first category interventions.”

Jacqui announced the intention to transition to a centralised energy purchasing basket to find efficiencies across the NHS. NHS England worked with Crown Commercial Service to shape an energy purchasing agreement, with everyone’s buy-in, specifically for the NHS.
“The savings on this initiative are going to be between £60 million and £100 million a year, she explained. Benefits also include, greater price stability, resilience to external events, increased budget, predictability, bulk discounts based on the consumption, volume, etc. It’s a significant amount of money saved just by bringing everyone together, simplifying the process and buying through the consolidated initiative. It’s a real example of how we can use NHS purchasing power.”

Looking forward

Arriving at standardisation across a very siloed operation is always going to be a challenge. But with a robust engagement program that encapsulates all key stakeholders, best practice and reducing the barrier of size and scale, the team is succeeding, and Jacqui puts a lot of it down to data.

“Ultimately it’s about telling the story and delivering the message that we’re better together. Data has helped us do that, but you have to ensure you have the right access to data and know what to do with it,” she says. “When we work as one NHS with a category approach, we will realise savings efficiencies, we will open the door to creating dynamic markets and leverage every spend in existing markets. And this is really exciting in a very exciting year for public procurement.”

Transformation Outcomes

The transformative category management program spearheaded by the new CPO and Future Purchasing culminated in delivering remarkable savings of 11% reduction over a 12-month period. This initiative not only introduced category management as a fundamental practice within the business but also profoundly embedded it into the organisational ethos. As a direct result, the procurement team underwent significant upskilling in category management, which in turn fostered enhanced relationships with stakeholders across the business. Procurement transformed itself from a functional necessity to a strategic partner, now perceived as a positive force for change and innovation within the company.

Significant category savings projects included: