Category Management Course: Procurement Category Analysis with Claude Code
Turn raw procurement data into board-ready category strategies with no coding background. Ten hands-on recipes take you through Kraljic matrices, should-cost models, savings pipelines and QBR decks in Claude Code, and you keep the work as portfolio proof.
11 chapters, 11 lessons
14-day refund on the yearly plan. Real pricing on the plans page, no surprises.
11
lessons, yours to run
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
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 from real implementation work
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, so what you build keeps working as the tools change.
A category management course should give you time back for the deal itself. Right now a single category strategy document can take two to three weeks: hunting data across systems, forcing spreadsheets into tables, and writing an executive summary that's out of date by the time it's approved. Multiply that by forty categories. When an interviewer for a senior role asks what tools you use, 'Excel and gut feel' no longer covers it. Work that used to need 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 hiring category managers expect Kraljic and SWOT skills. They also want people who can build the automated tooling that produces those outputs at scale and hand it to the team. You leave this course able to show both, with skill files and strategy documents you built yourself.
From subscribing to running your first artifact
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.
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.
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.
Building the IT Category Strategy: from raw data to CPO-ready document
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You'll get the most from this if
Category managers still producing strategy documents by hand who want to cut that work from weeks to hours without hiring a data analyst
Procurement analysts moving into category management or strategic sourcing who need portfolio proof of commercial and analytical skill
Indirect and direct buyers managing several categories who need a consistent, repeatable method that doesn't depend on one person's tribal knowledge
Students and early-career procurement professionals who want to start their first role already fluent in AI-assisted category analysis
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.
Straight answers before you subscribe
Is this a category management course or a data course?
It's a category management course. The ten recipes cover the outputs a category manager produces: Kraljic matrices, should-cost models, savings pipelines and QBR decks. Claude Code handles the data work from your plain-English prompts, so your time goes on the category decisions.
I have never written a line of code. Will this work for me?
Yes, and the course is designed for that. Every recipe gives you the exact prompt to type in plain English. You don't write code. Claude Code writes and runs it for you. From lesson one the course assumes you know procurement and have never programmed. 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've built and understood each recipe, the skill files you save run against any CSV you bring from your own organisation. The method is designed to be portable from the first lesson.
What if I try it and it is not right for me?
Refunds depend on the plan. The yearly plan has a 14-day full refund. In India every plan is a one-time pass that isn't refunded, but it never renews without you, and you can try a free lesson before you buy. The refunds page has the full policy.
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 the updated material automatically. Update notes on the course platform show what has changed.
Can I use the artefacts and skill files I build here in my 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. The licence terms on the platform have the precise wording, and they cover commercial use of what you build.