Source to Pay AI Cook Book

Turn raw procurement data into board-ready category strategies, automatically, no coding background needed

For category managers and procurement analysts who want to build Kraljic matrices, should-cost models, savings pipelines, and QBR decks using Claude Code, and have the portfolio proof to show for it.

11 chapters, 11 lessons

11

lessons, yours to run

What you'll learn

Easy to pick up, built to get you the next job

No coding background needed, and you write code with Claude as you go.

Every section below turns into something a hiring manager recognises, not just notes.

Go from four CSV files to a complete category strategy in one session
  • You will load procurement data and profile spend concentration, supplier risk, and contract coverage in seconds rather than spreadsheet hours
  • You will instruct Claude Code to draft a structured strategy document covering an Executive Summary, Spend Overview, Supply Market Assessment, SWOT, and a 12-month Action Plan
  • No coding background required: every step uses plain text prompts you can type straight away, and the first working result arrives in your first lesson
  • You will produce an artefact a CFO or CPO can read on Monday morning, which is exactly the output a hiring manager expects from a senior category manager
Build a Kraljic matrix and savings pipeline your team can actually act on
  • You will place categories correctly across Strategic, Leverage, Bottleneck, and Routine quadrants using real spend and risk data, not gut feel
  • You will construct a savings pipeline that ranks opportunities by value and flags where single-supplier concentration creates commercial or operational exposure
  • These are skills listed by name on procurement job descriptions, and you will have live artefacts to prove you can execute them
Package every analysis as a reusable skill anyone on the team can run
  • You will save your prompt chains as Claude Code skill files so the next category takes one command, not another week
  • You will build subagents and slash commands that let a colleague reproduce your full methodology without knowing how it was built
  • That means you become the person who scales procurement capability across the team, which is a head-of-category-level skill regardless of your current title
Produce QBR decks and should-cost models that survive supplier scrutiny
  • You will generate supplier performance summaries and should-cost breakdowns grounded in your own data, ready for a quarterly business review
  • You will flag data quality issues such as malformed trend fields before they corrupt a pivot table and embarrass you in a meeting
  • Every output you build here is a portfolio piece: a real artefact from real data that demonstrates commercial judgement, not just technical curiosity
Outcome

Finish this course and you can do all of this, no prior background required:

  • You will be able to build a complete, board-ready category strategy document covering spend overview, supply market assessment, SWOT, and a 12-month action plan from raw procurement data, the core del
  • You will be able to place categories on a Kraljic matrix using real spend and risk data and justify the placement to a CPO or CFO, a skill that appears by name in category manager job descriptions
  • You will be able to identify supplier concentration risks, such as a single vendor holding more than 60 per cent of category spend, and surface them in a structured output before they become a boardro
  • You will be able to construct and maintain a savings pipeline ranked by commercial opportunity, grounded in contract coverage data and year-on-year spend trends
  • You will be able to package any analysis as a reusable Claude Code skill file, meaning the next category or the next colleague takes one command rather than another week of analyst time
  • You will be able to demonstrate AI-assisted procurement analysis in a job interview or a QBR using real artefacts built on real data, putting you ahead of candidates who can only describe the theory

11 lessons, 11 chapters

Built by practitioners, not influencers

Every agent, skill file, and dataset is drawn from 25+ years and 50+ Oracle ERP implementations across pharma, manufacturing, semiconductor, and distribution.

Kept current with the stack

Claude Code, skills, and MCP move fast. Your licence includes every system update for as long as you're subscribed. Your system gets better, not obsolete.

Where most people are stuck

Category managers spend more time building the deck than thinking about the deal. A single category strategy document can eat two to three weeks: hunting data across systems, wrestling spreadsheets into tables, writing an Executive Summary that is already out of date by the time it is approved. Multiply that by forty categories and the maths is brutal. Worse, when you apply for a senior role and the interviewer asks what tools you use, saying 'Excel and gut feel' is no longer enough. Procurement teams that have not adopted AI-assisted analysis are slower, more expensive, and increasingly less competitive for talent. The work that used to justify a team of analysts can now be done in an afternoon, and employers know it.

What you'll be able to do, module by module

Every module leaves you able to build and run something real. Here is the syllabus, in the order you work through it.

Curriculum

11 chapters · 11 lessons

Course Resources

You can locate and load all four provided CSV data files into Claude Code immediately, so no lesson is blocked waiting for data to be sourced or formatted.

Files1 item
  • Data Files for All Chapters🔒

Category Analysis Recipes

You can run ten end-to-end category analysis recipes using Claude Code, producing Kraljic matrices, spend concentration flags, should-cost models, savings pipelines, and QBR-ready strategy documents from raw CSV data, and package each workflow as a reusable skill file your whole team can operate.

Building Your Category Strategy Foundation1 item
  • Building Your Category Strategy Foundation🔒
Positioning Every Category on the Kraljic Matrix1 item
  • Foundations of Kraljic Matrix with Claude Code🔒
Computing True Total Cost of Ownership1 item
  • Computing True Total Cost of Ownership🔒
Managing Your Savings Pipeline1 item
  • Managing Your Savings Pipeline🔒
Closing the Savings Credibility Gap1 item
  • Closing the Savings Credibility Gap🔒
Surfacing Demand Consolidation Opportunities1 item
  • Surfacing Demand Consolidation Opportunities🔒
Rationalising Your Supplier Base1 item
  • Rationalising Your Supplier Base🔒
Building Should-Cost Models That Win Negotiations1 item
  • Building Should-Cost Models That Win Negotiations🔒
Monitoring Commodity Markets with Automated Alerts1 item
  • Monitoring Commodity Markets with Automated Alerts🔒
Automating the Category Council QBR1 item
  • Automating the Category Council QBR🔒

Employers can find category managers who understand Kraljic and can write a SWOT. They cannot easily find people who can also build the automated tooling that produces those outputs at scale and hand it off to the team. Stacking that combination makes you the candidate who changes what procurement can deliver, which is a different conversation entirely.

How it works

From subscribing to running your first artifact

  1. Subscribe and access your data files

    After subscribing you get immediate access to the course platform and the Data Files for All Chapters provided in the Course Resources module. The spend, supplier, contract, and market CSV files are ready to load from lesson one. Nothing to configure, no data to source yourself.

  2. Open Claude Code and follow the recipe

    Each lesson gives you the exact prompt to type, explains why it works, and shows you what to look for in the output. You start with the Category Strategy Foundation recipe and have a working, board-ready strategy document before your first session ends. No prior coding knowledge assumed, plain English prompts throughout.

  3. Save your skill file and build your portfolio

    The final step of each recipe packages your prompt chain into a reusable Claude Code skill file. One command now runs the full analysis against any category in your dataset. You leave with working artefacts, a documented methodology, and a demo you can walk through in an interview or a CPO review.

A worked example from this program

Building the IT Category Strategy: from raw data to CPO-ready document

  1. Load and profile the IT portfolio

    You point Claude Code at the four provided CSV files and run the ingestion prompt. In seconds it reads 40 categories, identifies spend, supplier count, contract coverage, and Kraljic quadrant for each sub-category, and flags a data quality issue where year-on-year trend figures are stored as text strings rather than numbers. A human analyst would typically discover that error only after a pivot table returns a wrong total in a meeting.

  2. Surface concentration risk and spend patterns

    You run the spend analysis prompt. Claude Code calculates that the IT portfolio spans six sub-categories and roughly 42.7 million dollars of annual spend, that Network Services has a single supplier holding 52 per cent of category spend, and that SaaS Subscriptions is growing at more than 15 per cent year on year with only 55 per cent contract coverage. These are the findings that go straight into the risk section of the strategy document.

  3. Place categories on the Kraljic matrix

    You run the Kraljic recipe. Claude Code reads the kraljic_quadrant field alongside profit impact and supply risk scores, confirms that Enterprise Licenses and Servers sit in Strategic, IT Consulting and SaaS in Leverage, and Network Services in Bottleneck, then generates the rationale for each placement. You have a defensible Kraljic output without building a single formula.

  4. Draft the full strategy document

    You run the strategy document prompt. Claude Code produces a structured document with an Executive Summary noting the Microsoft renewal risk in Q2, a Spend Overview table, a Supply Market Assessment referencing the consolidation trend in network services, a SWOT using the concentration and coverage data, and a four-quarter action plan including an RFP for Network Services and a SaaS rationalisation from 42 to 25 suppliers. The whole document is written, formatted, and ready to review.

  5. Package as a reusable skill file

    You save the prompt chain as a Claude Code skill file. To produce the same analysis for any other category in the dataset you change one line. The methodology is now documented, repeatable, and transferable to a colleague without any knowledge transfer meeting.

Proof you can show

The toolkit you'll build and run in this program

You leave with working assets, not notes.

Real things you can demo in an interview.

A working Claude Code category strategy skill file that generates an Executive Summary, Spend Overview, Supply Market Assessment, SWOT, and 12-month Action Plan from four CSV inputs

A Kraljic matrix recipe that places categories using live spend and risk data and flags quadrant movements

A supplier concentration risk report that automatically identifies and flags single-source exposure above configurable thresholds

A savings pipeline artefact ranked by spend value and contract coverage gap, ready to present to a CPO or finance director

A library of reusable slash commands and subagent configurations so any team member can reproduce the full methodology with one line

A portfolio-ready demo built on the course dataset that you can walk through in an interview or a supplier QBR to prove hands-on capability

Who this is for

You'll get the most from this if

Category managers who are still producing strategy documents manually and want to compress that work from weeks into hours without hiring a data analyst

Procurement analysts looking to move into a category management or strategic sourcing role and needing portfolio proof of commercial and analytical capability

Indirect and direct buyers who manage multiple categories and need a consistent, repeatable methodology that does not depend on one person's tribal knowledge

Students and early-career procurement professionals who want to enter the market already fluent in AI-assisted category analysis, not learning it on the job

Yearly plan: 14-day keep-the-system guarantee

14-day refund on the yearly plan. Finish the first two modules, and if you haven't run your first live pipeline, take a full refund.

Questions

Straight answers before you subscribe

I have never written a line of code in my life. Will this actually work for me?

Yes, and that is the design intent. Every recipe gives you the exact prompt to type in plain English. You do not write code; Claude Code writes and runs it for you. The course builds from lesson one on the assumption that you know procurement, not programming. Daily live sessions and mentor review mean you have a real person to ask if anything is unclear.

Does it work with my own procurement data, or only the course files?

The course uses the provided CSV files so every learner starts from the same clean baseline. Once you have built and understood each recipe, the skill files you save run against any CSV you bring from your own organisation. The methodology is designed to be portable from the first lesson.

What if I try it and it is not right for me?

There is a 14-day refund policy. If you work through the material and decide it is not what you needed, you can request a refund within 14 days of purchase. The free preview lesson also lets you see the teaching style and format before you commit.

How does the course stay current if Claude Code or the underlying tools change?

Updates are included. When the tooling changes, the lesson content and skill files are revised and you get access to the updated material automatically. You will also see update notes in the course platform so you always know what has changed.

Can I use the artefacts and skill files I build here in my actual job?

Yes. The skill files, strategy documents, and saved prompt chains you produce are yours to use commercially. You can run them against your organisation's data, share them with your team, and include the outputs in internal reports or supplier reviews. Review the licence terms on the platform for the precise wording, but commercial use of what you build is explicitly covered.

Finish this program and walk in as the operator employers can't ignore, not another applicant with no experience.