Integrating and Executing Category Management: An Interview With Coupa

Our ongoing series about category management (CatMan) has devoted a lot of time looking at what the use cases for tech are in CatMan, what capabilities are needed and what vendors exist that address these needs. To further our understanding of how tech plays in CatMan and the way it is intertwined with how we conceptualize the discipline, we reached out to source-to-pay provider Coupa.

In May 2025, Coupa announced it had acquired Cirtuo, a category management software provider. Our analysts writing at the time noted that “Coupa’s acquisition of Cirtuo, the leading and benchmark for best-of-breed CatMan solutions, puts it in a stronger position to compete with these players, especially for customers who are willing to elevate procurement from a tactical/operational function to a strategic one.” In December, Bertrand Maltaverne, Lead Analyst for Upstream Procurement, sat down with Virkam Pathak, Chief Product Officer at Coupa, to discuss what role Cirtuo plays when integrated into Coupa’s tech ecosystem, how CatMan has transformed and what kind of mindset is needed to properly engage in the discipline. 

Change management is a continuous process

Coupa’s approach to integrating Cirtuo into its tech stack mirrors the evolution that has occurred in category management in general. “If you look at traditional category management from a few years ago,” Vikram explains, ”it was seen as the seven-step sourcing process, just a check off on the sourcing checklist. Now, though, we look at it more like an integrated end-to-end category management.” In practice, this involves tying business objectives to the execution of CatMan, a process that theoretically happens all the time but often gets forgotten.

“A big difference in this evolution,” he continues, ”is cadence. For example, I worked hard to create a successful strategy document, but it just lay in the binder. Maybe it was looked at once or twice a year. Now, we look at it as something continuous. It has ingestion from market intelligence, from data, in real time. So, it is a completely living and breathing document.”

“When I discuss category management,” Bertrand comments, “most people know best practices for category management exist, but there is a huge gap between that knowledge and what people actually do.”

Vikram agrees: “just as there is a difference between crafting a single-use strategy document and treating it as a continuous work, technology is not the only answer to category management. You cannot just implement take category management because it’s not just a technology fix. It is a mindset. It encompasses the culture of an organization, its processes, its people.”

Executing CatMan

The disconnect between seeing CatMan as a single incident and a sustained discipline seeps to other parts of the organization, according to Vikram – especially in today’s ever-volatile, ever-dynamic world. Where once you could focus on cost and follow the seven steps for effective category management, you now have to deal with changing risk, ESG goals and other shifting data that informs a living category strategy. Many organizations also have siloed systems in which one person handles sourcing, one person handles supplier performance management, etc. Implementing a system that connects all this disparate data into one process that also bakes in business goals and risk management strategies requires more than one draft. “My biggest challenge,” Vikram says, “is when I talk to customers who say that since they created their category strategy, they no longer need tools. That mindset has to change.”

Bertrand agrees, noting that the overlooked challenge is getting the strategy applied: “With execution, since things are more dynamic and your strategy may stray from the initial plan. I think a lot of people do not consider the execution and the action management, the pipeline management, polarization, savings, etc.”

“For us,” agrees Vikram, “category management can be broken down into Analyze. Strategize. Execute. First, you take in data that may impact the strategy you had initially drafted. There may be, for example, a new price initiative in the category that causes you to rethink your strategy. Instead of conducting a sourcing event and then managing your supplier relationship, you bring in your supplier at this point of creating the new category strategy around this change. Then, you can feed the new strategy into your category management framework so that it will be able to evolve more smoothly the next time.”

Category management has become a hub of procurement activity

To integrate Cirtuo, Coupa first concentrated on a consistent look and feel, a single sign on, etc. while attempting to improve its suite and retain what made Cirtuo a best-of-breed. 

“Cirtuo is now fully integrated into Coupa, all the way from spend analysis,” Vikram says. “For example, you could get all your spend data into Coupa where an opportunity analyzer churns through your data. Opportunities bubble up, and you can decide to seize it via a category strategy, a category initiative or by going straight into sourcing.

“So, what we have done is make category management the central hub around which everything else can pivot. For example, risk is also now modeled at the time of strategy creation, as opposed to responding to a disruption and searching for a new supplier on the fly. It takes the step of looking at all the market intelligence available – cost, should cost, etc. – at the time of creating the category itself. If you want to move manufacturing from Frankfurt to Berlin, you can weigh their different impacts on carbon into your strategy.

“Moreover, we focus on supplier collaboration. When there is, for example, a new product introduction, a price reduction or an initiative for diversity spend, the system helps model it and enforce it with a standardized strategy creation part.”

Standardization is a secondary way in which the technology assists. “Every strategy category manager cannot just do whatever they want. Technology stitches together a system with which you can analyze this data, create a strategy and execute it. So, that’s how we look at it. Category management is a central hub with an immense number of options. You could go supply chain, you could go to sourcing or you could just manage your supplier performance through this category management hub. So, for us, it is strategize, analyze, execute.

“Integrating CatMan into the Coupa Data Lake and D2P suite provides the added benefit of end-to-end analytics. Rather than waiting months for future spend data to be processed – only to discover that new strategies were not followed – this integration allows for near-instantaneous validation. For example, when a sourcing event is aligned with a new strategy and flows into contracts, the system tracks the resulting P2P process in near real-time. This enables immediate reporting on whether off-contract spend is being controlled, allowing the business to proactively take corrective action.”

AI will shrink the strategy creation loop

AI and the specter of job losses appear in every conversation about technology, and here is no different. “How do you see the job of category manager changing over the next ten years?” Bertrand asks. “Will it disappear because AI does everything automatically, or do you think people still have a chance?”

“I think that AI will work as an enabler for the category manager,” says Vikram. “Category managers working in the traditional way have a lot of heavy lifting. For example, you had to talk to your stakeholders, you had to see all the data that would inform the strategy and you had to bring in the various decision-making frameworks. Then, after all this, stakeholders have to review the data, collaborate, etc. Even with a tool like Cirtuo, creating the perfect category strategy this way would take six to eight weeks. 

“Or you can use Navi, the agent we built. We are revolutionizing strategy creation by replacing exhaustive questionnaires with Navi, our AI Category Consultant. By converting complex data entry into a simple conversation, Navi automates artifact generation and allows category managers to focus on insights rather than paperwork. If you cannot decide on a framework, you can ask it for its recommendation and map your stakeholders, condensing that month-plus timeframe into a matter of days. You can then review what the AI drafted and change it as necessary.

“So, I do not see AI replacing the category manager. Rather, the category manager would oversee the AI and validate its data, a skillset category managers have developed over the years anyway. What matters is upskilling these category managers so they can do their jobs.”

Many thanks to Coupa for speaking with us.