Achieve category management excellence with timely, contextualised intelligence covering supply market dynamics, price forecasts, spend and demand insights
End-to-end Category Intelligence at a glance:
- Robust, unbiased, contextualised intelligence and analytics across all stages of the category management lifecycle
- Self-service access to 560+ critical supply market insights for 26 category groups and 110+ sustainability, innovation and mega trend reports looking in-depth at the latest trends
- Custom intelligence and impact assessments from our category specialists answering your specific questions – with actionable recommendations
- Proactive news and alerts on relevant developments in key categories and supply markets defined by you
- Pre-built templates and custom tools to help you build world-class category strategies quickly and easily
Cut through the noise with category intelligence you can trust
Procurement teams are challenged by increasingly volatile supply markets and continued pressure to cut costs. But with huge swathes of unreliable public information and diverse datasets from procurement and finance systems, it is harder than ever to build and optimise effective category strategies, and identify valuable opportunities.
To deliver the strategic value their organisation demands from them, today’s procurement teams must be able to:
Identify emerging opportunities to cut costs, improve sustainability and lower risk before their competitors
Translate major trends and industry events into actionable innovation strategies that drive value in their categories
Understand the underlying drivers behind sudden price changes, and use that insight to mitigate the business impact
Provide timely guidance on the levers that can be employed to reduce long-term risk and drive sustainable cost savings
Understand evolving business needs and stakeholder demands and ensure category strategies and approaches are fit for purpose
We do more than just provide category and market data…
Every organisation and procurement team has unique category intelligence requirements. So, we’ve designed a modular solution where you define what you need, based on your specifications. With Category Intelligence from The Smart Cube, you can select capabilities and insights from across four modular elements:
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Self-service Standard Insights
Our proprietary platform Amplifi PRO contains 120+ category insights dashboards, 560+ insights reports, 12,800+ cost structures, 8,500+ commodity price datasets, and innovation intelligence for key categories.
Custom Intelligence
Request contextualised intelligence in the form of alternative sourcing destinations, supplier capability assessments, negotiation fact packs, should cost models and spend optimisation opportunities.
Category Monitors
Get proactive, custom insights on opportunities and risks for your strategic categories, including analyst alerts, commodity price forecasts and key supply market developments.
Self-service Tools and Templates
Get everything you need to enhance category decision-making in one place – including should-cost models, strategy development tools, critical supplier frameworks, and more.
How your business benefits
With end-to-end Category Intelligence from The Smart Cube, you can:
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Use robust, unbiased and contextual insights to build successful category strategies that deliver not only cost savings, but also highlight collaboration and innovation opportunities.
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Model various scenarios using advanced analytics and proven forecasting models to proactively build smarter price and supplier strategies.
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Free your talent from laborious manual research tasks and give skilled people more time to focus on supplier collaboration, negotiations, business partnering, and building effective category strategies.
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Uncover untapped opportunities that standard industry reports don’t surface, and gain a competitive edge with intelligence that highlights unexplored synergies, new opportunities and hidden risks.
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Mitigate risk with greater visibility of everything from supplier dynamics and new sources of demand, to socio-economic change and regulatory developments.
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Leverage the powerful combination of internal and external data to gain the deepest, most tightly contextualised view of opportunities and developments across your key categories and markets.
How we work with you
The Category Intelligence solution we deliver is built around you. Through close collaboration and a custom, modular approach, we create a bespoke intelligence solution, designed to support your specific goals and needs. Here’s how our process works:
Why choose The Smart Cube?
When you choose Category Intelligence from The Smart Cube, you always get:
Category Intelligence in action
Category Intelligence helps global top 10 pharma company save $2 million on thermoforms
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THE CHALLENGE
The client’s category team was unable to control the rising spend on thermoforms due to a limited understanding on the evolving dynamics on supply, visibility on cost model and supplier base.
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OUR APPROACH
We assessed the supply chain and stakeholders bargaining power; different end-use market demand; level of vertical integration and cost model to devise a better negotiation strategy for sourcing raw material and finished goods for thermoforms within the packaging category.
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VALUE DELIVERED
The negotiation strategy helped the category team achieve 10% ($2 million) savings on a spend of $20 million.
Custom category intelligence dashboards deliver key insights for global top 5 food company
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THE CHALLENGE
With access to multiple subscription sources, category teams were struggling to curate insights from all the clutter, making it difficult to meet their business needs and sourcing priorities.
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OUR APPROACH
We created custom category monitors for 35 specific ingredients (including colours, fruits, enzymes, flavours and nuts) based on spend and priorities. The monitors included price forecasts, correlation calculators, supplier risk, new innovations, cost structures and supply demand outlooks, all to identify key opportunities and risks.
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VALUE DELIVERED
The category monitors helped the category teams easily access critical information on a self-serve basis, and identify key levers to manage their categories better, ultimately saving time and money for the business.
Category Intelligence on scrap metal helped this steel manufacturer save millions
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THE CHALLENGE
The client wanted options to achieve cost savings in sourcing tin can bales in Europe so turned to The Smart Cube to investigate how it could improve its sourcing processes.
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OUR APPROACH
We studied the recycling process of tin cans and evaluated the supply chain of scrap processors in Europe to gauge scrap capacity, and key locations and suppliers in the region. We recommended altering certain sourcing practices and shifting to few ferrous scrap processors with robust supply chains.
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VALUE DELIVERED
The client improved its sourcing process and switched suppliers to save £4.7 million per year.
