Alignment of the Purchasing Strategy to the Business Strategy: An Empirical Study on a Harbour Cranes Company

The purchasing function is assuming an increasingly relevant role within companies in the last decades. This is due to a fact that purchasing strategy can contribute to develop competitive advantages. Therefore, it is important to align the purchasing strategy with the company business strategy. On the other hand, category management can be used as the basic unit of strategic purchasing analysis, which measures the competitive improvement in purchasing management. It its known that a differentiated purchasing strategy involves managing suppliers within the different categories, so that, it is considered that there should be a leadership to level category by purchasing managers to improve the company competitiveness. Hence, this paper contributes by presenting how aligned business and purchasing strategies and product categorization leads to increased competitiveness -by presenting an empirical study on a harbor cranes company.