Customer Reviews

Category Management in Purchasing: A Strategic Approach to Maximize Business Profitability

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Purchasing is rarely an exciting topic yet in Category Management in Purchasing Jonathan manages to interest the reader with an engaging style and a compelling review of the progress made at GSK. This is not a book for the academic - it is written by a skilled practitioner in terms that all practitioners will understand. The tools are a mix of old and trusted (Kraljik, team tools, etc) and new - Day One and Supplier Preferencing. What is different in Jonathan's covering of the 'old and trusted' is the context he establishes for each of the tools within the overarching Category Management process.

I sum up the value of the book quite simply - it is required reading for anyone who wants to understand Category Management at the highest level. It is an invaluable addition to the professional literature.

This is an excellent book on the subject of Category Management within Procurement (Purchasing) and many of the wider issues of procurement! Any procurement organisation that wants to self-improve can make use of it and CEOs,CFOs, Managers and Departmental Heads all need to understand that procurement is something complex and much more than just a transactional "black-box" that will manage itself. The author, Jonathon O'Brien, is clearly someone capable and experienced in modern procurement techniques.

It covers the real activities of Category Management very thoroughly to the point that one could take this book and using it and just common business knowledge, plan a project for a major improvement in procurement (aka purchasing). It also makes very clear that major procurement change needs executive understanding and endorsement. Case studies, diagrams and examples are plentiful and of good quality and will definitely help educate those who have not yet understood category management or the strategic issues of procurement.

Government and Not for Profit organisations can also learn the important value-for-money lessons from this book. It is often the case that they have the most at stake and don't realise it. The world is littered with the physical and political outcomes of poor procurement decisions made by government agencies, NFPs and Aid Agencies - primarily due to inadequate attention to procurement process. Many of these are in the multi-million or even multi-billion dollar realm and some may even be recurring. One hardly even needs research these, they are in global news items regularly. While this book will not solve for all of them it will put an operational Procurement organisation "on track" so that there are not repeated events.

If you have management responsibility and a sense of fiduciary diligence yet don't know how your procurement organisation(s) operate; or you have no measure of performance for the "Procurement Function" then you need to do some serious work. Get this book and find out if they (procurement) know any of the techniques that are in it. At this point, many organisations would try to engage a Management Consulting firm to help them.

My advice is to please resist this idea at this point, there may be need for additional resources at a later point. In my experience it is essential to become a skilled and informed buyer, before you try to buy consulting services. This is one procurement category that requires much skill and experience to handle yet it is regularly procured to "get around" some management problem or "internal political issue".NB This paragraph is my opinion based on experience and to my knowledge is not an opinion made by the author.

The book will help you become "procurement wise" and thence change your organisations procurement for the better. Once informed, you might well discover that the procurement organisation contains a group of decicated professionals that genuinely want to help but have been "roadblocked" or "side-stepped" by others. This is not uncommon and this is another place the authors experience shows, there are techniques to help an implementer of change deal with resistance to change or better, reduce or eliminate it.

There are real opponents to procurement change, both internal and external. Many suppliers (and supplier groups) do not want informed or skilled buyers who may ask detailed and probing questions before they buy. This book will help you define the correct proceses and questions and set them up in such a way that good procurement results will flow (if they are available) irrespective of the market sector in which you must procure. It will help you take the battle to the market.

Combine this book with Procurement, Principles & Management (10th Edition) and you pretty much can cover all the current procurement related issues quite thoroughly.

If I were going to a "procurement naive" organisation, this would be my first choice book to inform, educate and initiate procurement change.