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SalaryAre you a strategic thinker with a passion for leading category-focused procurement teams? If you're ready to take on a role where your ability to influence and drive change can help our business deliver value for money to our customers, consider joining us as our Senior Category Manager at Affinity Water, the UK's largest Water only business.
As a Senior Category Manager, you'll be at the forefront of leading our category capability and business partnering model with senior stakeholders. Your mission: drive stakeholder value through value delivery, supplier management and savings realisation.
Key Responsibilities:
Strategic Leadership:
Lead and inspire a dynamic category team ensuring business partnering.
Build influential relationships at an Executive level, implementing the full business partnering model to drive effective collaboration.
Strategic Development:
Take overall accountability for developing and implementing highly complex, business-critical, high-spend category strategies, influencing an annual sourcing spend exceeding £150M.
Value Delivery: Oversee the team's delivery of category and sourcing-led value, ensuring alignment with our Procurement & Commercial Balanced Business Scorecard.
Financial Impact: Facilitate the delivery of multi-million pound savings and defined benefits, collaborating with stakeholders and ensuring alignment with budgets.
Negotiation: Act as the lead negotiator for significant (multi-million pound) savings and benefits, fostering collaboration with all relevant stakeholders.
Strategic Planning: Lead the annual business planning process for specific spend categories in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
Market Insight: Conduct regular external market benchmark assessments, infusing category strategies with competitor market watch insights, trend analysis, dynamics, and innovation.
Compliance and Efficiency: Actively manage business compliance to the Procurement Policy, ensuring agile working methodologies and workload prioritisation for qualified opportunities.
Industry Recognition: Be the recognised expert in market and sourcing management throughout AW and the external market, bringing back innovation, insights, and ideas to drive business success.
Leadership Excellence: Lead, coach, and challenge a team of motivated and talented commercial professionals, promoting talent management and implementing a robust succession plan.
Experience required:
- Significant experience in leading business-critical spend categories and sourcing strategies.
- Stakeholder Management, Proven senior-level stakeholder management and business partnering skillset.
- Leadership: Demonstrable level of line management experience.
- Negotiation Skills: Proven negotiation and dispute resolution skill set.
- Problem-solving: Demonstrable problem-solving experience in large, complex organisations.
- Collaboration: Experience with cross-functional collaborative working methods.
Desirable experience
- Knowledge of the Utilities market sector and associated regulations.
- Project management experience.
- Degree preferably with a relevant post-graduate qualification (e.g., CIPS, MSC).
Benefits:
- Salary range between £65,000 to £75,000 depending on experience
- Hybrid Flexible working - Office based 2 days per week is expected, Improve your home-work balance
- Annual leave 26 days rising with length of service
- A generous pension scheme that doubles the contributions you make, up to a maximum of 12%
- We offer enhanced Maternity, Adoption and Shared Parental Leave. We also have a Carers policy and Menopause policy to help us support our people through different stages of their lives.
- Access to our Wellbeing Centre with support for looking after your physical and mental
- Discounts for Medical and Dental Insurance, Retail Outlets
- Volunteer days
- Affinity Water recognises the benefits of greater diversity in our workforce to better reflect the communities we serve. We are committed to building a more inclusive culture where every member of our workforce can thrive.
