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Drive Powerful Business Outcomes

With comprehensive category management software, you can create margin impact by aligning isolated spend management activities. Analyze categories, strategize on opportunities, and execute plans from one place to maximize the value of your procurement efforts.

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Get more from your procurement efforts

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Define and scope your strategies

Visualize company spending in one place to define and scope your overall category strategy. See quarter-to-quarter changes, how much savings are coming from each category, and where you can improve. Make decisions based on real-time data — not assumptions — with AI-driven insights from customer-contributed spend data.

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Easily create profiles and plans

Gain complete control over the planning and execution of each category with single-category overview planning pages. Uncover category-specific trends and opportunities with integrated analytics, then bring in relevant stakeholders to collaborate on objectives, success metrics, and roles and responsibilities.

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Gain maximum impact from AI guidance

Get instant insights into pricing, ways to consolidate suppliers, and improve spending classification with Coupa AI. We combine $7.5 trillion in anonymized spending data from the Coupa community, your company’s data, and AI to deliver personalized recommendations.

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Track progress and monitor outcomes

With configurable category plan templates, you can manage requirements and project timelines faster and more efficiently. Assign tasks to stakeholders and use alerts to keep everyone in sync. Keep track of progress with real-time performance metrics and refine your approach to achieve the results you want.

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Made for each other: Sourcing + Contract Management + Procurement

Accelerate value delivered from sourcing events by seamlessly converting awards into contracts and catalogs used for purchasing and invoice validation. Tight connections with buying enable automatic creation of spot buys based on rules to simplify tail spend management and free up sourcing resources.

FAQs

What is a category?

Fundamentally, categories are groups of goods and services that customers buy. Many companies run sourcing events to get these items. These events deliver a lot of value, but a one-size-fits-all approach may result in some objectives being misaligned with category needs and category needs that aren’t addressed at all. Category management is a more strategic way to build alignment that optimizes outcomes and creates additional margin impact.

 

What is category management?

Category management is a nuanced approach that centers on spend categories to create additional margin impact.

Think for a moment about the categories of spend that exist in your company. Are some of them strategically relevant to the business – as in, will you face downtime and revenue loss if a delivery is missed? Or are some categories more transaction-based, where cost is the focus and processes could be more efficient?

This will guide you from pursuing the right category management strategies to securing these goods and services. Category management software can help you, for example, know when to talk to suppliers about setting up strategic partnerships or optimizing invoicing channels and catalog management to prevent bottlenecks.

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