It is actually the Retailer who owns the process – Vendors play a role in the process to provide data and resources as category experts but they don't own the process.

As an example, suppose you organize your store's shelves using the category management principle: one shelf includes just dairy items, another only meat products, etc. The growth in sales of products in a certain category and the profitability of those sales serve as the primary indicators of category management.

Understanding Category Management in FMCG Retail: Category management is a retailing and purchasing concept where the range of products purchased by a business organization or sold by a retailer is broken down into discrete groups of similar or related products.

Category Management (CM) is a strategic approach to procurement where organizations group together similar areas of external spend to identify opportunities for consolidation and to create added business value. Approaches like this were originally designed for project-based sourcing of goods and services.