How to accelerate your Category Management adoption in 2025

Maturity assessments have a bad name. While leadership teams search for ways to increase resource efficiencies and effectiveness, many organisations lack the structured approach to review their processes and identify areas for improvement.

This article outlines how to perform a maturity assessment of your category management practices and translate the findings into actionable improvement opportunities and accelerate adoption.

The performance of your procurement organisation is relative

Everything is relative in Procurement. We collect three bids to assess the relative competitiveness of proposals. We create strategic options and scenarios to determine the implications of our choices. We are hardwired to compare ourselves to others. That is why the desire for benchmarks will never go out of style.

We perform the biggest benchmarking study in Procurement for Category Management and publish the bi-annual Global Category Management Report, now in its 6th edition. We are neither analysts nor researchers but strong believers that understanding trends and patterns allows us to identify opportunities for improvement. Just like analysing spend helps you identify new savings opportunities.

Procurement thinks it is better than the numbers say it is

In our recent webinar, ‘From Benchmarks To Traction’ we discussed how to embed Category Management across the Operating Model, how to build effective category teams, and how to continuously improve processes. The discussion was based on the findings and insights of the 2024 Global Category Management Report, the most comprehensive source of benchmarking for Category Management.

The Report found that 68% of available value remains uncaptured across the value dimensions of cost savings, risk reduction, and stakeholder value. While certain reasons for value leakage exist across industries and companies, many aspects are highly specific and unique to an organisation.

External benchmarks are a powerful tool for assessing the maturity of organisations and processes

Leveraging comparative insights not only helps to gain an understanding of your specific situation but also helps identify areas for improvement and opportunities for transforming your organisation more thoroughly. Unfortunately, verifiable benchmarks are hard to come by. And turning them into practical actions is even harder.

If done right, benchmarking can help you

• Identify strengths and improvement opportunities for your organisation
• Understand the efficiency of your Procurement resources
• Create a common understanding and commitment across the leadership team
• Establish a baseline for tracking performance over time, and
• Estimate additional value available in cost savings, risk reduction, and stakeholder value by becoming a high-performing organisation.

Insights without actions are useless

Nobody has ever been promoted for admiring a problem. Benchmarking is not done for the sake of benchmarking but to generate insights. And insights need to be acted upon. An assessment, therefore, must break down the findings in a structured format and into digestible opportunities that the organisation can act upon.

The identified improvement opportunities should be evaluated for their ease of implementation and their expected impact. Depending on the size of the analysis and the number of opportunities, they should be clustered and spread across a realistic time horizon. By breaking them down this way, you create a roadmap of opportunities towards a desired end state that can be broken down into concrete steps and actionable tasks.

Don’t do this alone

20+ years in Procurement consulting and 100+ projects have taught us that theory is great until it meets the real world. For over a decade, we have published the Global Category Management Report with more than 100 specific ideas for improving on the 60+ metrics it covers to help organisations benchmark themselves. We have seen progress in the results. Very slow progress.

That is why we have developed the Future Purchasing Maturity Assessment. Based on our Category Management Operating Model Framework, derived from 12 years of research with Henley Business School, the maturity assessment is designed to provide a specific evaluation of your situation, identify practical opportunities, and develop a focused roadmap of initiatives for strengthening your Category Management approach.

It benchmarks your performance versus global leaders and your sector to pinpoint where you are on your Category Management journey and to identify necessary adjustments to the current operating model that will have a big impact on overall process adoption and value delivery. The result of the assessment is a practical list of opportunities that turn Category Management into a competitive advantage and value driver for your organisation.

The Path to Category Management Excellence

Our overall objective is to help you reach excellence in category management and accelerate CatMan adoption. Excellence can be reached in areas like

• Resource efficiency
• Strategic alignment with business priorities and stakeholders
• Savings and value delivery, and
• Operational and supply chain risk reduction

The assessment is structured around the six proven dimensions of category management excellence:

Category Management strategy: defines how category management supports the delivery of the organisation’s strategic objectives, establishes category management objectives and KPIs, and formalises the plan to adopt and improve category management.

Stakeholder engagement: explores collaboration and cross-functional working between procurement and its stakeholders. It looks at how well category management is aligned with stakeholder processes, whether strategies are co-created, and whether annual plans of category projects are jointly developed.

Organisation structure: focuses on how Procurement is set up in terms of the organisational design, roles and responsibilities, and time allocations. It considers the resource balance across the team to manage category strategies, sourcing, and supplier management.

Capability & mindset: builds the critical category, technical, and behavioural skills for the excellent application of category management. It includes the definition of category management specific competencies, skill development, and whether procurement leadership champions category management.

Process & technology: includes the core Category Management toolkit with process steps, templates, and guidance. The toolkit ensures inputs are consolidated into a strategy document, supports the identification of value levers, and governs strategy development, approvals, and implementation tracking. Technology is digitally enabling and automating some of these tools and processes. Examples include spend analysis, market intelligence, strategy development, and execution planning, with some being supported by AI.

Value impact: defines and evaluates the deliverables from category management, including category strategy quality, value delivery across cost savings, risk reduction, and revenue and stakeholder value.

Step-by-step guide to performing the Maturity Assessment

Based on the outlined dimensions, Future Purchasing has developed an online survey to capture the current state of category management practices. The responses are consolidated, analysed, and benchmarked against industry leaders to form the basis for a high-energy 3-hour workshop with the procurement leadership team, where the initial findings for each question will be discussed and prioritised. The final recommendations are documented in a clear roadmap towards category management excellence – tailored for your organisation.

1 Planning

To initiate the assessment, we jointly define the benchmarking participants, align the timeline, and perform an alignment briefing with the Procurement Leadership Team. We establish the benchmarking assessment and communicate it to the involved participants.

2 Current Performance Assessment

The assessment starts with us building an understanding of your Procurement fundamentals around spend, KPIs, policies, operating model, org structure, etc. It also covers more specific questions around the CatMan adoption plan, ownership, spend coverage, 3-year value delivery, and the current pipeline.

The assessment includes a GAP analysis of CatMan processes and tools, training, and relevant interfaces like Supplier Relationship Management, Sourcing, and Contract Management. To validate the gained insights, we review your top 10 category strategies and interview category managers to understand their time allocation and challenges.

3 Maturity Benchmarking and Workshop

1-to-1 interviews are held with PLT to understand CatMan expectations and challenges with Category Management. All benchmarking participants complete our 15-minute online survey to provide information across the six dimensions.

Survey responses are consolidated, and we create a draft report v1 that covers each question and compares it with global CatMan leaders.

We then hold 3-hour PLT workshops to explore the results for each KPI in detail, confirm the current situation, and jointly develop tailored improvement recommendations. The workshop generates lots of energy, ideas, and alignment on the required changes for securing the untapped potential of Category Management.

4 Maturity Report and Roadmap

Based on the workshop output, we estimate the scale of the opportunity in terms of value delivery and resource efficiency. We finalise report v2 with an analysis of available strengths, gaps, improvement recommendations, and a practical development roadmap.

We then hold a 1.5-hour feedback workshop with the PLT to agree on key findings, recommendations, and the scale of the opportunity. The final output is a full report covering all six dimensions and a set of targeted recommendations to maximise adoption and transform the team into a high performing CatMan operation.

Transformation is an action word, not something that happens to you

We work with you to develop recommendations that drive capability uplift and value delivery across the dimensions of the Category Management Operating Model. We detail out the identified opportunities and enable you to decide on the priorities you want to tackle. Together, we build a tailored roadmap to strategic procurement and category management excellence and accelerated adoption for your organisation.

If you are interested in driving the transformation of Procurement, we would love to hear from you. While our framework is standardised, your situation is unique and can require targeted improvements or heavy intervention. We’re here to help.