b'This article is adapted from, Buying as One: Category Management Lessons from the United Kingdom by Anne Laurent (Washington, D.C., IBM Center for The Business of Management Government, 2019)Buying as One: Category Management Lessons From the United KingdomBy Anne Laurentadoption by agencies of this approach as a high priority in coming years. The United Kingdom began its category management initiative in 2010 and its greater maturity offers some useful lessons to the U.S. governments efforts on how to increase the adoption rate and avoid potential missteps. Furthermore, both the U.S. and U.K. efforts offer insights to other governmentsstates, localities, and other countriesuseful perspective and insights as they consider their own category management initiatives.Buying as One Category management organizes procurement spending into categories of goods and services available from the same The federal government spends about $500 billion a yearor a similar supplier base. It is a continuous, market-facing, on goods and services. More than half of this amount is forend-to-end process that encompasses all aspects of spending, goods and services common across federal agencies, suchfrom sourcing to lifecycle management, impacting the total as training, overnight delivery services, copier machines,procurement expenditure of an entire organization. and travel services. However, these common items are often purchased individually by more than 3,300 buying officesBoth the U.K. and U.S. governments focused category and over 40,000 contracting officers. For example, themanagement on governmentwide spending for commonly Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2016 notedpurchased goods and services, such as desktop computers, that agencies spend more than $1 billion a year on mobiletelecommunication services, electrical power, furniture, devices and service contracts and that Almost all of thatand travel. In the United Kingdom, this approach has spending is paid to four carriers, yet the federal governmentenabled the government to aggregate demand to approach manages over 1,200 separate agreements and buys moresuppliers as a single whole-government buyer, wielding than 200 unique services plans for voice, data, and textexpansive bargaining power, as opposed to multiple agencies capability. As a result, the federal government does notduplicating purchases of the same goods and services at leverage its buying power as a large customer, and vendorswidely varying prices. are constantly bidding on redundant work.The accompanying sidebar describes the key elements of A purchasing strategy adopted by the private sector threea category management framework within a government decades ago, called category management, organizesor enterprise that starts with the strategic and operational the spending on common goods and services acrossmission, and then flows to the overall procurement strategy the enterprise into defined categories, such as travel orand priorities through to the segmentation of contract commercial software, from the same or similar supplier base.spending into categories. Each category is managed by By buying as one, the Office of Management and Budgeta team that employs various tools to analyze buying and projects that the federal government can avoid up to $18spending patterns, conducts market analyses, and works billion in unnecessary spending by 2020. with agency-level buyers to ensure they can make the best-informed purchases.The federal government began its category management initiative in 2014 and the administration has designated the 96 www.businessofgovernment.org The Business of Government'