479: Can Digital Help Scale Category Management Best Practices? w/ Remko Van Hoek and Gary Levitan

Art of Procurement

Far more teams talk about category management than successfully carry it out, but is the challenge one of talent or scale? It is certainly one of the more creative processes procurement engages in, which opens the door to more value creation - as long as procurement has the right metrics and KPIs guiding their work.

In this week’s episode, we bring you a session from our recent AOP Digital Outcomes 2022 virtual event. Kelly Barner was joined by Gary Levitan from WeWork and Remko Van Hoek from the University of Arkansas to discuss whether or not category management initiatives can be executed at scale.

Key takeaways from the interview include:

• Category management can facilitate stakeholder collaboration when products, services, and/or suppliers overlap
• How the automation of rote and even ‘boring’ procurement tasks can make it possible for procurement to invest more time and effort in strategy
• Why it is important to consider automation part of a process or a subset of spend categories instead of waiting to include 100% at the same time