Category Manager

Location: London, UK/Poland/India/Greece

What we're looking for

Responsible for contributing to, and executing, LR's overall procurement and sustainability strategies for spend. Working closely with budget-owner stakeholders in Corporate Functions and in LR's Service Lines, you will be responsible for developing and implementing individual category strategies, for a wide range of professional services, travel and mobility, and employee-related services.

What we offer you

• The opportunity to work for an organization that has a strong sense of purpose, is values driven and helps colleagues to develop professionally and personally through our range of people development programmes.

The role

• Developing strong relationships with internal business and functional leaders in order to influence behaviour ensure the appropriate and timely involvement of Procurement in all sourcing activities; influencing, challenging and jointly developing strategic sourcing strategies.
• Designing and managing procurement project plans for individual initiatives, evaluating processes and identifying risks and issues to ensure contracts are delivered on time, to budget, with improved benefits and savings for LR.
• Work with direct reports to develop team members and educate in Procurement best practice.
• Actively manage your team to ensure the hardware and software queues are maintained in a timely manner.
• In conjunction with business and functional leaders, leading on requests for information, requests for quotations, requests for proposals and other commercial information on specific projects.
• Managing the commercial bid process, negotiation of terms and conditions, assessing risks and implementing suitable strategies to mitigate risk.
• Forging and maintaining trusted partnerships with LR's suppliers and partners; holding suppliers to account, managing performance through the use of metrics and improving LR colleagues' satisfaction.
• Driving continual improvement of existing suppliers and contracts, while managing contract lifecycles / timescales effectively, to (re-)negotiate terms of greater value to LR.
• Working within LR's governance model, ensuring procurement methodologies and standards are maintained, appropriate and are complied with, and that risks are appropriately managed.
• Being an active advocate for the Procurement team; educating the business and showing the value and benefit that involving Procurement early on in sourcing initiatives can bring.

What you bring

• Member of CIPS or Degree-level equivalent
• Strong commercial acumen, with extensive and relevant experience of 3rd-party negotiations, commercial terms, contracting and subsequent vendor management; strong negotiator that achieves optimal results.
• Sound understanding and experience of, partners and suppliers, including supplier development and relationship management.
• Pragmatic in approach, with an ability to interpret a range of differing priorities and influence the outcome range of senior stakeholders.
• Able to foresee and solve challenges that may have a broad impact on the wider business strategy or outcomes. Sensitive to needing to manage impacts on colleagues / managing change.
• Results-driven and highly customer-focused; concerned with meeting, and exceeding, customer expectations. Able to manage to deadlines.
• Ability to structure RFPs, evaluate and summarise responses against a broad set of criteria and provide recommendations regarding vendor selection.
• Financially literate and analytical in nature.
• Proven ability to operate in a complex and diverse environment, with strong stakeholder engagement, written and oral communication skills.
• Highly developed influencing skills and ability to work collaboratively, both upwards and at peer level, with functional and business colleagues.
• Sound understanding and experience of how to overcome the barriers to achieving significant change that can result from a new (procurement) approach.

If you share our vision for safety and sustainability, we want to hear from you.