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Programs
- Category Management
  Realize your strategic objectives: cost, risk, value, innovation or sustainable supply chain.
- Supplier Relationship Management
  Unlock value in your supply base, manage risk, create competitive advantage and build sustainable supply chains.
- Negotiation
  Build confidence in negotiation outcomes, boost business results.
- Buyer’s Toolkit
  Realize your purchasing power, buy and negotiate effectively.
- Sustainable Procurement
  Realize supply-side Corporate Social Responsibility.
- Procurement Transformation
  Make procurement a strategic contributor to business success.
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Category Management

Category Management is a powerful approach for strategic procurement. It focuses on working with your organization’s key areas of spend to secure added value. When implemented effectively, this approach can build significant competitive advantage, deliver dramatic cost reduction/mitigate cost increases, drive supply-side sustainability, and secure the value and innovation required for business success.

Positive Purchasing combines the latest generation of SaaS and digital platforms to enable Category Management in your organization. Choose Capella – the Guided Category Strategy Creator^® or Procleus^® – the platform for strategic procurement; both powered by our industry-leading 5i^® Category Management methodology.

Our 5i^® Category Management training is world renowned as the benchmark. We can develop your team through either virtual online or classroom training and equip them with the expert tools and resources that are essential for success.

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Our Category Management program is built on our unique 5i^® methodology.

This stage-based approach – incorporating Initiation, Insight, Innovation, Implementation and Improvement – uses best-practice theory and has been proven to deliver breakthrough results in organizations around the globe. 5i^® enables cross-functional teams to develop and implement high-impact sourcing strategies for key areas of organizational spend (purchasing categories).

1Initiation
2Insight
3Innovation
4Implementation
5Improvement

1Initiation

Scope the purchasing category opportunity, engage with the organization and mobilize a cross-functional team, determine our power position and shape our requirements.
2Insight

Deep dive data gathering and strategic analysis around the supply base, the supply market, price and cost, internal needs and the external environment, to determine strategic direction.
3Innovation

Explore potential sourcing options, identify the optimum high-impact sourcing strategy for the category, and secure agreement from the wider organization.
4Implementation

Plan the implementation of the new category strategy, managing change and roll out including negotiation, selecting new suppliers and contracting as appropriate.
5Improvement

Supplier Relationship Management and ongoing improvement for the category.

Choose the solution that's right for you

Our Category Management program combines extensive tactical, psychological and practical elements to provide you and your organization with a complete blended solution for developing the skills and confidence to realize outstanding results

Capella - Guided Category Strategy

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Create powerful category strategies that will deliver game-changing value from your supply base.

Procleus - Digital Platform

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The platform for strategic procurement and negotiation featuring digital learning academy, toolkits, intelligent workflow tools and assessment options.

Training Courses

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High-impact, instructor-led training courses delivered either online, in the classroom, or a blend of both.

Program Mobilization

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Facilitated workshops to help your senior team to mobilize a successful Category Management program.

Guided Category Strategy Creator^®

Powered by the proven 5i ^® Category Management process for best practice strategy creation, Capella is the latest thinking in software driven strategic procurement. Capella helps you break free from traditional templates and dependence upon good application – it is the new way procurement teams can build breakthrough category management strategies.

Capella’s guided category strategy creator means anyone in your team can become an expert category management practitioner.

Capella will intelligently guide you through the 5i ^® process and works for simple areas of spend right up to the most complex of categories. It will lead you to the strategy that will deliver your objectives, whether they are focused on cost, sustainability, innovation, risk, or other value from the supply base.

Enabling Category Management

Assessment

Toolkits

Academy

Intelligence

AI Guided

Assessment

Individual and team-wide assessments to develop a measure of core strategic procurement and negotiation capability. Assess individual role-based skills and get tailored and managed learning and development pathways through the Procleus learning academy.

Assessed via online self-assessment, or a fully managed interview-based program, we offer structured insights into personal and team-wide capabilities and provide the basis to create a targeted learning and development roadmap.

Toolkits

Strategic sourcing and negotiation toolkits featuring full process and extensive suite of reference materials and resources to support each step, plus online and downloadable templates for:

Category Management

Build powerful category strategies with the 5i^® Category Management sourcing and 5i^® Lite toolkits, now with sustainability embedded at every step!

Supplier Relationship Management

Unlock value in your supply base with the 5S Orchestra of SRM^® methodology including the 5A Strategic Collaborative Relationship (SCR) process.

Negotiation

Build your confidence in negotiation outcomes to deliver outstanding results with our Red Sheet^®, Red Sheet Lite and Red Sheet Nano negotiation planning toolkits.

The Buyer’s Toolkit

Realize your purchasing power with the 5D Power Buying^® process featuring practical step-by-step guidance for every stage of buying.

Sustainable Procurement

Realize supply-side sustainability and equip and enable your team to meet organizational sustainability goals with the OMEIA^® Sustainable Procurement process.

Academy

A comprehensive range of digital learning modules and managed learning programs to measure and develop individual and team-wide procurement capability, end-to-end. If you need something bespoke, we can create custom learning modules or programs to reflect specific organizational needs.

Digital learning library

Vast library of digital learning modules for Category Management, SRM and negotiation with self-study and on-demand video for all core toolkits and activities.

Digital dynamic learning

Managed time-bound team learning programs, with options from ‘digital learning weeks’ to 12-month supported programs.

We can also uplift team capability with instructor-led training. Discover our programs here.

Intelligence

Complete your configuration with one of our partner apps to give you everything you need for strategic procurement.

Supplier sourcing

Source-to-contract

Market and vendor discovery

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AI Guided

Power your Procleus platform by plugging in our AI guided workflow tools:

Capella – The Guided Category Strategy Creator^®

Capella creates powerful category strategies underpinned by the proven 5i^® method to deliver game-changing value from the supply base: secure supply into the future, deliver cost savings, reduce supply-side risk and drive sustainability.

Ruby – The Guided Negotiation Plan Creator^®

Ruby enables you to create winning negotiation strategies using the leading Red Sheet method, allowing globally dispersed teams to seamlessly work together. You can even live role play with Ruby!

Buyer’s Toolkit Platform

Built on our unique 5D Power Buying^® process, the Buyer’s Toolkit provides a simple step-by-step approach to buying well. The platform covers every stage of buying and combines all the best-practice tools and theory for professional buying and negotiation into a straightforward framework that can improve the result of a purchase at any scale.

Training courses

We offer high-impact courses for individuals and procurement teams. These courses can be delivered online as a series of instructor-led workshops, in a classroom setting, or as blended learning solutions. Our trainers are renowned experts in the field, with personal experience gained from practicing procurement for large organizations around the world.

Public Course - Online | Category Management

Category Management – Advanced – Online Public Course – May and June 2025

CPD Certified

This online advanced course, scheduled for 12-13,19-20 May and 2-3 June 2025, covers all aspects of our proven 5i® Category Management process. View Course

Public Course - Online | Category Management

Category Management – Advanced – Online Public Course – October 2024

CPD Certified

This online advanced course, scheduled for 14-15, 21-22 and 28-29 October 2024, covers all aspects of our proven 5i® Category Management process. View Course