Category Management Processes Assessment

Organizational Assessment

1. What is the current state of the company?
2. Does the company have the personnel with the necessary skills and ability to fully implement Category Management?
3. Do the Category Managers’ job descriptions define the job they actually perform?
4. Does the organization have the necessary senior-level support of Category Management to make it beneficial and meaningful?
5. Identify employees’ views of the current organizational structure and efficiency.
6. Determine if personnnel says the current organizational structure is effective and efficient? And if not, why not?

Organizational Design

1. How should the organization be best structured considering the unique skills and strategy of the company?
2. What changes need to occur to facilitate implementation?
3. What is the best process to best balance workload within each department?

Category Management Training – Initial and Continuation

1. Determine if basic, intermediate, or advanced training is required.
2. Establish levels of existing competency and provide a targeted training program.
3. Provide individual coaching where needed.

Retailer and Supplier Collaboration

1. How to create mutual focus on the shopper?
2. Development of supplier collaboration strategy for clients.
3. Development of “Top-to-Top” strategy and provide necessary training.
4. Creation and delivery of collaboration training for Category Managers.
5. Assist in evaluation of short versus long term supplier strategy.
6. Develop effective data-sharing strategies and procedures.

Negotiation Training and Strategy Development

1. How to create mutual trust and avoid adversarial relationships?
2. How can both the retailer and the supplier optimize the relationship and leverage the strengths of both companies?
3. What can be done to reach mutual agreement without negatively impacting the relationship?

Establishment of Category and Item Roles

1. What category and item roles are needed for your company?  These will vary from company to company.
2. Definition of specific roles for each category based on banner positioning.
3. Integration of category roles into the department and category strategy.
4. Facilitation of process to assign roles for both categories and items.

Establishment of appropriate Category Management data hierarchy

1. Determine system considerations.
2. Gain a clear understanding of your shopper’s purchase decision hierarchy overall and by category.
3. Create data hierarchy for systems to allow quality category analysis.

Price and Promotion Strategy Development and Training

Promotion Optimization

1. Time spent on promotions typically require 20% or more of Category Manager’s time. What can be done to improve the process and eventual results?
2. One-third of promotions fail to grow sales and one-third drive a loss. How to best address this opportunity?

How to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of promotions.

1. Setting Pre-promotion expectations.
2. Performing effective, realistic post-analysis of the promotion.

Development of pricing strategies for the company and departments.

1. A high-quality pricing strategy is the most effective tactic to become more competitive in the mind of the shopper and a method to align your objectives with your shopper’s expectations.
2. Understand that not all items are of equal importance and integrate into your pricing strategy.

Maintaining alignment between corporate strategy, banner, and category.

1. How to best balance retailer objectives with shopper desires?
2. How to effectively integrate overall company or banner strategies with category-level pricing?
3. Effectively maintaining alignment over time.

CCC Item and Supplier Rationalization Process

1. Improve overall profitability through product assortment and supplier efficiency.
2. Balancing inventory and service levels are critical both for your ROI and for your customers’ satisfaction.
3. Align inventory levels with individual banner strategy.
4. How to determine items that are 100% solution candidates.
5. Identifying duplicate brands(vendors) that are candidates for exclusivity.
6. Leverage negotiations with suppliers during item/supplier rationalization.
7. Reduction in markdowns, out of date merchandise, and excessive inventory.