Solution

Implementation of category plan is vital for ensuring an organisation capitalizes on its competitive advantage to increase overall revenues and control the business environment (Oppong, 2018). The different encountered challenges would also be solved.

5.1 Customer-centric Organisation Arrangement

As identified in Oracle (2021), Oracle operations are informed by the necessity for creating sustainable relations with suppliers leading to delivering a high-level value to their software products customers. This is with high trust, collaborative practice, and innovation. Nevertheless, the Oracle procurement department needs to diversify its operations by engaging cross-functional teams involved in the entire category plan. The products in appendix 1 are further grouped into market segmentation. A successful segmentation is impacted by the employees’ lack of detailed skills and relevant knowledge of advancing the practice. For solving the issue, change of their standardised category plan is essential, which has been in place for many years. Further, the capacity development of different stakeholders in regard to their knowledge on products and marketing knowledge could be improved.

5.2 Developing a Functional Supplier Trust

For category plan to guide an organisation to achieve value addition and reduced costs, implementation of a long-term, stable and mutual progressive commercial relations is essential. Inexistence of functional relations is noted in Chang et al. (2018) to lead to the category plan implementation failure. To create a sustainable relation with all the previously identified suppliers, supplier management plan can be established. Different advisors and experts would also be engaged to promote the process involved in communication and attaining procurement department objectives.

In this category plan stage, the challenge would include a sustainable and future-oriented relationship by the different stakeholders. This has a direct impact on the success of the overall category plan. For solving this problem, in line with the interests and influence of the different stakeholders, they could engage actively in the different phases of the category plan. Appropriate guidance to add customer value and dominate the market could be harnessed with distinct stakeholders involved, establishing mutual trust.

5.3 Evaluation and monitoring of Success of Category Plan

In the procurement of different spend categories for Oracle company, particularly office materials procurement, scorecards despite their impact influencing a holistic transformation of various business measures. As evidenced in Ingólfsdóttir and Dyndegaard (2012), planning is essential for the category plan to be successful. For evaluating the success of category plan, the starting plan success is supposed to be evidenced. The different activities advanced at the start of the category plan represent antecedents of success. However, there prevail useful metrics intended to ensure that a category plan implementation succeed owing to customers change, retailers, and different vendors.

In this regard, a significant issue is the inexistence of a direct strategy adopted to measure category plan success. Consequently, it is challenging to implement a category plan and achieve or leverage a competitive advantage. To mitigate the identified challenge, there could be a need for the Oracle team to make sure they are integrating relevant checklists and scorecards to measure category plan success levels.

5.4 Definition of categories, Improvement and Enhancement

This is the last phase of implementing the category plan. In this regard, rather than an introduction of product line, various subcategories are used to guide the planning to establish the ultimate category. Also, in this step, the major challenge is a failure of assigned distinct category roles and prioritising appropriate systems for Oracle to be positioned in differentiating their categories. To solve the challenge, a competitive-based analysis can be implemented. For the success, incurred gains from different categories and value for money would be achieved. Hence, this would interfere with Oracle’s capacity to capitalise on the competitive advantage from the category plan. Also, to solve this issue, the competitiveness ability of Oracle could be evaluated. This can be achieved with Oracle identifying the association of category roles and performance financially. The process can be inclusive of successfully transitioning from traditional procurement strategies to a modernised approach inclusive of all stakeholder’s interests. Therefore, a successful competitive analysis can be used in generating different incentives from end-users stakeholders for varying market segments characterised by distinct customer categories.

6.0 Conclusion and Recommendations

6.1 Conclusion

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