Category Management Resources

Barkers > Category Management Resources

Category Management Resources

Category Management Consulting

We firmly believe that category management consulting tools, templates and technology are only as good as the passion, skills and experience with which they are applied. They need to be appropriate to the client’s capability and capacity for adopting a category management approach. In our experience we rarely deploy our full suite of tools, preferring to use the minimum possible to achieve the primary client goals in the most effective way possible.

Adoption of a formal Category Management Process delivers the following benefits:

Category Management Principles

At Barkers we seek to promote the benefits of our category management principles with our clients, with CIPS to the broader profession, with blogs and whitepapers intended to share our knowledge.

The concept of category management consulting originates from marketing, where managers had to decide whether to organise their sales team by product, geographically or by value/risk (CIPS: Category management). As a business process category management was first developed in the USA for supermarket retailers. Today the approach incorporates elements of business improvement processes and change management.

Seven Police Force Collaboration

Seven Forces needed capability and capacity support for developing category strategies and conducting complex OJEU procurements for new, high-value FM contracts. Seven Forces were able to realise the first major contracts to be tendered as a Seven Force collaboration whilst delivering £5.4m of savings, setting up a further £1.7m savings and enabling £29.6m of social value contribution over the life of the new contracts.

Boosting Profitability with Better Category Management

In an environment where many organisations are suffering from “demand shock” with revenues and profits under significant pressure and at the mercy of forces which are beyond their ability to control, thoughts naturally turn to better category management or in short, the management of cash and costs.