Super Simple Category Strategies

Recently, Patrick Jonsson together with  James Meads recorded a podcast “Super Simple Category Strategies”.

Patrick explains how he doesn’t come from anything of a tech background. From his home in Sweden, he’s embarked on an international career – everywhere from South America to Denmark. The bulk career of this was in procurement for complex organizational setups: Lots of stakeholder management and getting different cultures to agree. Then about three years ago, he went into consulting, but then decided it was time to move into the digital procurement space.

He found low code/no code solutions really interesting, and so following a low budget, bootstrap approach he launched a minimum viable product with his first solution, which only cost around 2000 dollars. There were some issues with his first customers, but in solving those he fell on what seemed to be needed: A solution for guided category strategy creation.

Simplicity is Patrick’s keyword here. Category Management Tool is a very simple tool that helps you get started with making category strategies. And with a low code platform, he aims to add further functionality and complexity over time.

James says to Patrick that any SaaS solution will face the conundrum of functional complexity versus user experience. There’s not really a right or wrong answer here, and it can often come down to organizational maturity and complexity. James ask Patrick who he sees as the target users for Digiprocure. Is he aiming for large enterprises, or smaller businesses?

Patrick thinks the answer is medium-sized and up. In his experience, many organizations struggle with making category strategies. You might get a consultant in and end up with a strategy that’s maybe 30-60 pages long, and these just end up on the shelf. Follow up on implementation might not ever get done. Then later you get a new CEO who wants to make some category strategies and you start the whole cycle again.

So Patrick is aiming for what he calls  ‘maturity level 2’ companies. By this he means companies who are starting to dabble in strategic sourcing. You need that maturity and you need a certain size – maybe two or three category managers to make sense to use Digiprocure.

Patrick says that if you want to go quite simple, his system could do one category in less than an hour. He explains that one of the selling points of his solution is customization of complexity. You can set the level of detail you want, and that varies the depth of questions that you’ll be prompted with. Then based on your answers, here are some primary and secondary strategies that you might consider. From there you can set goals, barriers, and approvals. So it can be very simple, but it can also get very complicated.

Read more on the procurementsoftware.site!