CatMan hasn’t used up its lives

I read with interest your article (MW February 1) “The Final Curtain”.

Category management, like any innovation, takes time to evolve, mature, and fit to an organisation. Implementing a new process as fundamentally far-reaching as category management is bound to be a learning experience, and we applaud Sainsbury’s for its ability to recognise this and adjust its approach as a result.

Sainsbury’s would appear not to have axed category management, but to have changed the focus of its category management initiative to ensure that category strategies are actually implemented. In so doing it will quickly harvest the business benefits to be gained from efficient assortments, effective promotions and strategic pricing initiatives.

Category management is more than just a series of templates; it should be a complete end-to-end process in which the category manager creates a category plan, implements specific tactics around assortment, space, pricing and promotion, and then reviews category performance against a specific set of performance indicators – the scorecard – in order to understand whether the tactics worked. It should be an iterative process, and the emphasis is as much on implementation and performance review as on creating the plan itself.

Without integration between these “plan, implement and review” stages, the tendency is for companies to create plans and strategies at a category level, only for them to sit on the shelf until the next review, without ever having been implemented.

It has always been a concern in the industry that the planning element of the process is difficult to scale across multiple categories; the technology has not been available to support this function and the whole planning exercise has been paper-based and therefore difficult and costly to implement. This has meant that instead of implementing the whole process, retailers have stalled at the planning stage and have therefore failed to reap the benefits.

Sir Peter Davis’ latest initiative seems to acknowledge this, and will, as likely as not, prove the validity of the category management approach at Sainsbury’s.

Many software vendors have tried to deliver a solution that performs, that can handle the information volumes involved and – probably the most important – that enables the category plan to be implemented.

As the leading suppliers of solutions to the grocery industry, we at Armature have recognised this issue. This week, we are launching Category Manager – a software solution that enables grocery retailers, in collaboration with suppliers, to manage the whole category management process from category definition through assortment, pricing and promotions implementation to category review. Category Manager provides a seamless, consistent toolkit that allows the retailer to close the “plan, do, review” loop.

Your closing comments are astute – category management needs to be taken to the next level. We believe that now there is a viable means for technology to support this new way of doing business, the way forward has been found; your depiction of a tombstone for category management is premature, we are only at the birth of the next stage, not the death of the whole concept.

Iain Nicol

Product marketing manager

Armature Limited