Position Summary
The Procurement & Strategic Sourcing Manager will have full ownership of Velocity's purchasing and strategic sourcing function. This is not a transactional purchasing position. We are looking for a proven procurement leader capable of rebuilding processes, developing buyers, negotiating sophisticated supplier agreements, establishing vendor-management systems, reducing supply risk, and creating a professional procurement organization.
The successful candidate must be equally comfortable negotiating a multimillion-dollar supplier agreement, sourcing a difficult-to-find component, reviewing machining costs, developing an overseas supplier, and sitting beside a buyer teaching them how to negotiate a purchase order. This individual will have significant autonomy to redesign the department.
Procurement Leadership
- Lead, coach and develop Velocity's purchasing team.
- Establish clear buyer responsibilities, commodity ownership and purchasing standards.
- Personally train buyers in negotiation, sourcing, supplier management, commercial analysis and PO management.
- Establish purchasing SOPs, approval structures and escalation processes.
- Build a disciplined daily and weekly management cadence.
Strategic Sourcing & Supplier Development
- Develop domestic and international sourcing strategies.
- Identify and qualify alternate suppliers for critical and high-risk components.
- Source fabricated, machined, cast, forged, electrical, mechanical and automotive components.
- Develop overseas sourcing relationships where commercially and operationally appropriate.
- Evaluate make-versus-buy opportunities and support outsourcing of machining, fabrication and other manufacturing processes.
Commercial & Contract Management
- Lead commercial negotiations with key suppliers.
- Negotiate pricing, payment terms, lead times, freight terms, tooling ownership, warranty obligations, minimum-order quantities and long-term supply agreements.
- Understand and negotiate PO terms and conditions.
- Develop RFQ/RFP processes and competitive sourcing events.
- Establish annual cost-reduction targets.
Vendor Performance
- Segment Velocity's supplier base by spend, criticality and risk.
- Establish supplier scorecards covering quality, cost, delivery and responsiveness.
- Conduct regular business reviews with key suppliers and develop corrective-action plans for underperforming suppliers.
- Reduce single-source and long-lead-time risk.
Planning & Material Availability
- Partner closely with Supply Chain Management and Production Planning to ensure material availability.
- Use MRP/ERP data to proactively identify future shortages.
- Drive supplier commitments against production requirements.
- Eliminate dependence on last-minute expediting and firefighting.
First-Year Expectations
- Build a formal procurement operating system.
- Establish commodity and supplier ownership across the buyer team.
- Develop measurable buyer performance standards.
- Implement supplier scorecards for strategic suppliers.
- Establish contract and negotiation standards.
- Reduce past-due purchase orders and supplier shortages.
- Produce measurable purchase-price and total-cost improvements.
- Develop alternate sources for critical supply risks.
- Raise the capability of every buyer on the team.
Candidate Profile
We are specifically looking for someone who has built or transformed a procurement organization.
- 10+ years of manufacturing procurement/supply-chain experience.
- Significant leadership experience developing buyers.
- Strategic sourcing and supplier-development experience.
- Contract and commercial negotiation expertise.
- Domestic and international sourcing experience.
- Experience sourcing machined and fabricated components.
- Strong understanding of manufacturing processes and cost drivers.
- ERP/MRP expertise; NetSuite experience preferred.
- Demonstrated cost savings and supplier-performance improvement.
- Experience creating procurement processes, KPIs and SOPs from the ground up.
We are not looking for someone whose experience consists primarily of administering an established purchasing system. We want someone who has walked into imperfect environments, built the system and made the organization better.
Key Performance Indicators
- Supplier on-time delivery
- Material shortages affecting production
- Past-due PO reduction
- Purchase-price / total-cost improvement
- Supplier quality
- Strategic supplier coverage
- Alternate-source development
- Buyer development
- Contract coverage
- Expedite spend
