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Aavenir Atlas early access is open Contractflow on the ServiceNow Store since 2019 Runs on ServiceNow, or standalone ProcureTech100 2025/26 Pioneering Digital Solution ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, SOC 2 Type 2 compliant

Glossary

What is category management?

Category management is a strategic approach to procurement that groups spend into categories of similar goods or services and manages each one as a business unit with its own strategy.

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How category management works

Spend is broken into categories, such as IT hardware, facilities services or packaging. Each category gets a manager who understands its market, users and suppliers, and who builds a plan covering demand, sourcing, supplier relationships and risk. The idea came from retail, where products sold are grouped into categories, and procurement adopted it for what is bought.

Why it matters in procurement

  • Consolidation. combining demand across business units for better terms.
  • Expertise. category managers know their market deeply.
  • Strategy. decisions follow a plan, not one purchase at a time.
  • Supplier relationships. fewer, better managed suppliers.
  • Risk. category level view of concentration and continuity.

The category cycle

A typical cycle runs: analyze spend and requirements, research the market, set the strategy, source and contract, then manage performance and review. It repeats as contracts come up for renewal and markets change.

How Aavenir handles it

Aavenir Atlas answers category questions across every contract, such as which agreements expire this year or what each supplier charges for the same service. Category managers can then run sourcing events in RFPflow.

Keep reading

Spend analysis Spend analysis is collecting, cleaning, classifying and analyzing spend data to see what an organization buys, from whom and...Read more Supply positioning model The supply positioning model sorts what you buy by two measures, spend and supply risk, so procurement can choose the right...Read more Centralized procurement Centralized procurement is a model where one department, usually at headquarters, buys goods and services for the whole...Read more

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

Common questions

What is the difference between category management and strategic sourcing?

Strategic sourcing is a process for buying a category well. Category management is the ongoing ownership of that category, including demand, supplier relationships and performance between sourcing events. Read about supplier sourcing.

How do you define procurement categories?

Group items that share a supply market and suppliers, using a spend taxonomy. Categories should be large enough to matter and narrow enough to have a clear market and strategy. Read about spend analysis.

What tools help category managers?

Clean spend data, a contract repository with searchable terms, market intelligence, sourcing tools and supplier performance data. Being able to ask questions across all contracts in a category saves the most time. See Aavenir Atlas.

Have a question we have not answered? Ask the Expert

Schedule a demo

See your contracts run on one record.

  • 1 A 30 minute walkthrough Built around your team, whether that is procurement, legal, IT or finance.
  • 2 Your contracts, not ours Bring a few sample agreements and watch Aavenir AI extract and review them.
  • 3 ServiceNow or standalone We show the deployment that fits the systems you already run.

Prefer to talk first? Contact the team.