Manager, Procurement - Ingredients

Job Description
Job Purpose
As a Procurement Manager for Ingredients, you will lead all strategic planning and sourcing activities for the assigned categories and related subcategories across the North American Zone (U.S. and Canada). You will use your experience and knowledge to build comprehensive strategies at the category level and implement the strategy through the sourcing process. Through effective supplier and contract management, you will drive program compliance, generating value for Kraft Heinz. Your work will drive sustainable strategies that actively seek to reduce and control costs for ingredients while increasing efficiency for the business. The role requires close partnership and collaboration with various partners in various Business Units, Operations, Legal, Finance, Quality, and the Global Procurement team to provide innovative new products and services to meet business objectives. Success in the role requires balancing superior service to internal business clients and global collaboration, all while enhancing value for the company.
Essential Functions & Responsibilities

• Ability to deeply understand and use procurement processes, tools, and systems and implement ansuperviseee lifecycle management processes. A proven expert in category planning, development, and execution. Ability to achieve tangible results in competitive and non-competitive supplier negotiations directly and as a coach to others.
• Manage mid to executive-level clients and supplier relationships continuously to ensure customer satisfaction.
• Lead sourcing and category management for Kraft Heinz's comprehensive portfolio of sophisticated and critical categories, including identifying and assessing potential new supplier partners for business viability, including financial and quality.
• Establish and deliver performance goals for a portfolio of categories representing significant spend. Includes driving productivity projects -initial scoping and implementation throughout the network while working with a cross-functional team through execution.
• Lead strategic sourcing projects for supplier selection/optimization to implement Category Management vision and strategies.
• Manage Supplier Relationships and conduct Supplier Business Reviews, including being the primary point of contact for performance and risk issues.
• As part of the role's supplier management activities, you will segment suppliers at the category level while developing and managing the supplier base for your categories.
• Lead discussions with critical suppliers around long-term objectives and strategies, ongoing market trends, innovation and technology advances, and potential investment decisions.
• Facilitate supplier collaboration with the assigned set of critical suppliers to use their capabilities, achieve continuous improvement, and bring innovation to the business.
• Support major supplier issues and work with partners to identify and drive resolution.
• Identify business needs at the sourcing and category project level in the following areas: assurance of supply, quality, service, cost, and innovation. Develop a multi-year category vision and strategy based on the data, insights, and business requirements.
• Build strong business relationships to increase influence over total category spend.
• Identify and evaluate potential value-generating projects based on complexity, resources, risk, implementation time, and estimated financial impact.
• Manage a prioritized portfolio of projects for the category in the near and long term.
• Lead the supplier selection and RFx award process.
• Drives sophisticated contracts following policies and processes; can apply competency across categories.
• Actively understand category dynamics (current market, pricing, cost drivers, industry, and supplier variables) through trade groups, publications, etc., and communicate changes to business partners.
• Manage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) at the category level and be accountable for measuring and reporting value delivery.
• Enable continuous process improvement and cost reduction.
• Ensure the strategic sourcing process is robustly applied to all sourcing projects.
• Collaborates with global procurement peers to ensure support and alignment.

Expected Experience & Required Skills

• Bachelor's degree in supply chain management, finance, business, or related field. Candidates with extensive meaningful experience will be considered instead of a degree.
• Possess at least 3 to 5 years of demonstrated ability in direct Procurement, preferably in ingredient/commodities procurement, with relevant category expertise.
• Experience in Supplier Performance and Risk Management tools is highly desirable.
• Strong written, verbal, and analytical skills, as well as interpersonal and presentation skills.
• Proven project management skills, solid analytical and consultative skills, and the ability to make sound, data-driven business decisions. Prior experience with business case development and multi-workstream project management is critical to success in this role.
• Strong intuition for business with the ability to understand and explain Procurement results and variances to non-Procurement audiences.
• Experience in developing long-term business strategies and confidence when doing so.
• Has extensive experience in the sourcing life cycle process and a firm grasp of the tools needed to complete it.
• Ability to multi-task, attention to detail, organized, outstanding customer service skills.
• Judgment to handle confidential information and complicated business situations; ability to lead and influence others; project management, problem-solving, leadership, and team-building skills.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) and an understanding of source-to-pay tools (SAP, Ariba, etc.).

Location(s)
Chicago/Aon Center
Kraft Heinz is an Equal Opportunity Employer that prohibits discrimination or harassment of any type. All qualified applicants are considered for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. Applicants who require an accommodation to participate in the job application or hiring process should contact [email protected] .