Market intelligence is an essential tool for category managers today. Understanding trends in key purchasing categories, risks posed by countries and suppliers, and what’s driving costs, can make all the difference when developing and managing an effective sourcing strategy.
But not all market intelligence is created equal. Decisions made on inaccurate, biased, or out of date intelligence may not be the right ones for the business – and may even be actively damaging. And what we see from many of our clients today is they are faced with an overload of data and information, and they just don’t know where to start – or stop.
Category managers should be relying on the most robust market intelligence – which means objective, verified, contextual and timely information. Other factors can greatly aid them in their roles – such as intelligence delivered in a way that makes it easy to access, wherever and whenever, and visualised in a format that makes it easy to understand.
At The Smart Cube, we have addressed these challenges through our own internal organisational intelligence engine, Amplifi, which brings together years of accumulated procurement knowledge and tools. Amplifi underpins our customised solutions, and enables our analysts to work more efficiently, delivering “intelligence, accelerated”.
But we don’t just want our analysts be able to leverage robust intelligence and useful decision-making tools – we want to extend it to our clients, many of whom have requested access to Amplifi.
And this is why today we are launching Amplifi PRO:
Amplifi PRO is a new on-demand digital platform we have built to give category managers access to:
- Essential procurement intelligence: Users will be able to leverage more than 250 category insight reports, category news, cost structure and drivers, and key country and supplier risk ratings – the key building blocks of procurement intelligence, and the starting point for generating insights to enable better decision-making.
- Useful decision-making tools: Going beyond providing pure intelligence, we have built in useful decision-making tools, such as our dynamic category strategy development tool, which incorporates external intelligence with users’ own internal demand factors, to recommend the optimal sourcing strategy for their categories – leading to real value-adding contextual insights.
Pierre Mitchell, Chief Research Officer, Spend Matters, said: “Every enterprise procurement organisation needs a centre-of-excellence focused on supply market intelligence, but no organisation should be cobbling this together with backward-looking ad hoc market reports. Real intelligence is built upon timely insights derived from deep data by seasoned experts. The Smart Cube is definitely on the right track with its Amplifi PRO platform that helps brings the power of deep intelligence from its internal experts out to easily consumable insights and tools for power users in procurement and the business.”
The Smart Cube is bringing Amplifi PRO to World Procurement Congress – come and visit us for a demo.
To get more insights into how to supercharge your category management with market intelligence, read our white paper.