Procurement Manager - Ingredients

Position Summary:

Proactively manage the direct raw material supply base to meet or exceed Ventura Foods’ service, quality, cost, inventory, growth, and innovation requirements. 

Major Duties and Responsibilities:

• Operational Performance: 
  • Partner with key functional leaders and stakeholders to deliver best-in-class service, quality, cost, and inventory performance.
  • Conduct business reviews with key internal stakeholders and suppliers to monitor progress against key goals/priorities, identify issues and opportunities, understand category trends, etc.
  • Proactively monitor and manage supply risk to ensure continuity of supply.
• Commercialization / Strategic Sourcing:
  • Lead and/or support commercialization/growth initiatives impacting  suppliers (bids/RFQ, best in class speed to market, new products, new suppliers, etc.).
  • Implement category and sourcing strategies that delivers against our overall requirements at best value pricing.
  • Partner with cross-functional teams to expand our supplier network (identify potential partners, assess capability, develop supply chain model, negotiate pricing and supply agreements, qualification, and implementation that most effectively addresses VF expectations).
• Cost Savings:
  • Proactively partner internally, with suppliers, and with external category expert partners to identify, assess, develop business cases, priortize, and execute cost savings initiatives that leverage product optimization, value engineering, service/quality optimization, supplier optimization, process improvement, competitive bidding, "should cost" modeling, joint continuous improvement, supplier negotiations, etc.
• Performance Reporting:
  • Generate performance reports that track and analyze key performance metrics on a monthly and/or quarterly basis (Quarterly Business Reviews).
  • Identify and align the cross-functional team on the root cause issues, solutions, and improvement opportunities.
  • Key metrics include service, quality, cost, cost savings, inventory, inflation summaries, etc.
  • Provide insights to identify root cause and improvement opportunities.  
• Inflation and Cost Management:
  • Leverage market/commodity insights, inflation mitigation techniques, escalation/de-escalation agreements, etc. to forecast and secure market competitive pricing.
  • Provide quarterly updates on cost inflation by category, and update quarterly standard costs.
• Partnerships and Supplier Relationship Management:
  • Develop highly engaged supplier partners as well as category expert partners that provide a competitive advantage for Ventura Foods.
  • Segment suppliers as strategic, collaborative, and transactional, and develop strategies and plans to drive improved value with suppliers in each segment.
  • Develop and execute supply agreements/contracts.
• Best Practices:  
  • Benchmark sourcing best practices processes and tools for raw material categories.
  • Partner with functional leaders, stakeholders, and suppliers to adapt, embrace, and incorporate those best practices as a standard operating procedure for VF. 

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent Manufacturing Operations experience, is required.
• Direct ingreident procurement experience is required.
• 5+ years Procurement and/or Strategic Sourcing experience, inclusive of vendor selection, negotiation, commercial agreements, and supplier performance management, is required.
• 7+ years Purchasing and/or Supply Chain Planning and Management experience, is required.
• Ability to travel 20% in North America.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Supply Chain or Engineering is desired.
• Masters degree (M.B.A.) beneficial.
• CPSM highly desirable.
• Experience in food manufacturing environment beneficial. 
• Experience in co-pack or food manufacturing environment highly desirable.  
• Lean/six sigma training and experience highly desirable.  

Knowledge and Skills:

• Demonstrates strategic thinking combined with tactical actions.   
• Successfully leads and influences key stakeholders at all levels and across diverse functions, cultures, regions, suppliers, and sites.                                  
• Effective working in a matrix organization and comfortable working in teams.        
• Strong leadership, project management, negotiation, influence, and presentation skills.
• Adept at influencing change and alignment with the ability to foster partnerships up and down all levels of the organization with areas such as Supply Chain, Packaging Engineering, Quality, Finance, Manufacturing, S& Ops,      
• Strong overall business acumen and organizational savvy with the ability to effectively deal with ambiguity.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.                  
• Results oriented, self-starter, and able to handle multiple initiatives while meeting all key objectives and deadlines.
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills.  
• Proficient with analytical and presentation software including Microsoft Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Word.