(Solution) CIPS Category Plan Implementation, Challenges Faced and Solutions
- In this report, a category plan for Oracle in office materials category of spend has been developed.
- Category planning has been noted to be a practice where category plans are established aligned with clients business objectives strategically to maximise value, risk reduction, and supply of goods and/or services effective management.
- Therefore, the Oracle category plan is in tandem with retail and business portfolio objectives to advance clients’ needs. The process is applicable in enhancing value maximisation, reducing risks, and goods and services supply management.
- The applied data inform this assessment findings obtained using techniques such as Kraljic Matrix, Market Structure, PORTER’s 5, and SWOT analysis.
- Further, existing data focusing on insights of market competition and TCO is successfully analysed.
- Eventually, a successful category plan implementation has been developed, identifying challenges and approaches for mitigating the difficulties identified.

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Description
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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- Within six months, PS&M personnel will be provided with chances for capacity building through partnerships with educational institutions to gain knowledge and skills for implementing category management.
- The PS&M would become more motivated in the long run by providing recognition and benefits for pursuing category management implementation.
- Within a year, an effective change management strategy would be pursued, focusing on tracking the change and spotting change resistance
1.0 Introduction
1.1 ADNOC Organisation Background
In this report, the organisation of focus is Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). This is for understanding the impact of contract terms and conditions on distribution of risk and power with their suppliers. This is an organisation which began its operation in 1971 and today is ranked as the leader in diversified energy group which is owned by Abu Dhabi Government (ADNOC, 2022). The organisation network of holistically integrated business has based their operations across the entire energy value chain assisting their capacity for meeting overall demands of the consistently changing energy markets. For remaining competitive, the organisation has allocated $15 billion for advancing and accelerating lower-carbon solutions, investment in new energy solutions and decarbonisation technologies for lowering their carbon intensity with 25% by 2030 and successfully facilitating their NetZero by 2050 target. The company has a network of fully operational companies that operate throughout the entire hydrocarbon value chain, handling tasks including exploration, production, processing, storing, refinement, and supply in addition to manufacturing a wide range of petrochemical products. I work as a Contract Engineer for ADNOC Offshore, one of the company's divisions. The offshore division of ADNOC is responsible for the delivery and development of oil and gas resources in the waters surrounding Abu Dhabi. With OPEX and CAPEX, ADNOC Offshore spends over 3,000 million dollars annually. The organisation structure is as illustrated in figure 1; Figure 1: ADNOC Organisation Structure1.2 Identified Category Management
The deployment of the iSourcing system, a technology-focused procurement procedure, was chosen as the category management in this study. The need for oil and gas has significantly expanded in the modern era since the Covid-19 epidemic. As a result, ADNOC is forced to spend money on equipment to help them process and refine more oil and gas products. In light of this, the team leader's responsibility is to see that an iSourcing system is in place and can be utilised to purchase the new machines that the company needs to upgrade its operations. Locally in UAE, regionally in the Middle East, and internationally in Western nations, this would apply. This project aims to produce a report outlining the implementation of the change approach. This is done while ensuring the team members and leader have the necessary abilities to carry out the plan successfully. Implementing the new category management strategy is the kind of change being sought. The learner will be the team leader throughout the full category management process since a team has been chosen to oversee the deployment of iSourcing. The practical approach would be utilising various tools and strategies that demonstrate leadership and best practices in change management, along with a focus on the category management data from the ADNOC firm.2.0 Change Management Approach
2.1 Introduction of the Required Change Process
In its Procurement Supply and Management (PS&M) budget, ADNOC had allocated roughly 10 million UAEis before the COVID-19 epidemic. Up to 5,000 domestic and foreign providers are currently utilised in this. Because of the significant financial allocation in PS&M, the ADNOC sourcing method is crucial to their operations in this scenario. Logistics, equipment, and facility administration are all purchased separately by the organisation, all of which fall under the organisation's primary spending categories of computers and technical systems. As a result, they lack a centralised system that would allow all departments to be involved in aiding the procurement procedure (CIPS, 2020). The Burke-Litwin Model (Coruzzi, 2020) can pinpoint the internal and external factors that contributed to the identified change. This model ranks the many change drivers according to their importance and provides evidence of each one in figure 2; Figure 2:Drivers of Change Model When taking into account the ADNOC organisation and indicated change, these elements have the following effects, as stated in Table 1: Table 1:Summary of the Drivers of Change in ADNOC OrganisationFactors of change | Explanation |
External environment | Supply chain networks have been significantly impacted since COVID-19. ADNOC's ability to replenish stock, equipment, and machinery has been affected. Therefore, ADNOC would participate in strategic alliances by including diverse actors and intermediates in the complete value chain through iSourcing |
Individual and oganisational performance | ADNOC's investment in iSourcing would reduce PS&M turnover, everyone's performance, and supply chain network satisfaction. |
Leadership | To ensure iSourcing success, the PS&M will lead and manage efficiently. This inspires and guides other organisations to iSourcing success. |
Mission and strategy | The achievement of ADNOC's aim to provide high-quality oil and gas products would be ensured by the deployment of iSourcing. The justification for this is to quickly and effectively engage highly qualified vendors. |
Organisation culture | Implementing iSourcing would promote the collaborative and teamwork-oriented organisational culture of ADNOC. This is due to the platforms offered by iSourcing that provide suitable options for teamwork and collaboration. |
Task requirements and individual skills | Employees at ADNOC lack the knowledge and skills necessary to deploy iSourcing. This deficit might be filled by offering possibilities for professional advancement. Implementation of the change would be successful. |
Employee motivation | This report's proposal suggests that providing monetary and non-monetary rewards is necessary to encourage people to adopt iSourcing. This is for employing remarkably contemporary systems of practice. |