Sr. Manager, Ingredients - Cheese

As the Sr. Manager, Ingredients - Cheese, you will be responsible for all strategic planning and sourcing activities for Cheese across Kraft Heinz US. You will build a comprehensive strategy at the category level and implement the strategy through the sourcing process. You will manage key supplier relationships and strategize and lead key negotiations. To succeed, the role requires a strategic procurement expert adept in the complexities of ingredient procurement to drive both financial and performance results. You will collaborate daily with key internal stakeholders, including Business Units, Operations, Finance, Quality, and R&D.

Essential Functions & Responsibilities

• Manage cross functional supplier relationships; facilitating Supplier Business Reviews, escalating and solving performance and risk issues, ensuring customer satisfaction, and increasing influence over category spend.
• Lead discussions with critical suppliers around long-term objectives and strategies, ongoing market trends, innovation, and technological advances.
• Serves as primary interface between company components and suppliers on strategic/critical quality, engineering and procurement matters.
• Manage a prioritized portfolio of projects for the category in the near and long term.
• Develop and implement a Category Strategy in collaboration with operations and commercial, delivering on business needs based on data and insights and using external best practices.
• Lead strategic sourcing projects for supplier selection and optimization to implement Category Management vision and strategies.
• Lead the supplier selection and RFx award process by driving highly sophisticated contracts following policies and processes, applying expert-level negotiation techniques and tools in all situations.
• Ensure contracts are in place for all suppliers of all goods inclusive of terms and conditions, payment terms, and delivery schedules in accordance with the requirements.
• Own, build, and deliver productivity and cash targets aligned with overarching goals and objectives.
• Enable continuous process improvement and cost reduction.
• Monitor costs to ensure they are controlled and within budget and ZBB savings tracked.
• Produce and maintain a supplier price history database to capture and assess the supplier's service, quality and price performance.
• Assists in annual budgeting and preparation of prices, cash flow, supplier contracts, reduction of demurrage, working capital and potential write offs.

Expected Experience & Required Skills

• Strong strategic thinker who considers various perspectives and impacts of issues and can project them into the future.
• Results-oriented, adept at solving complex challenges and dealing with ambiguity; anticipates and adjusts to problems and obstacles in the team or the organization.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; proven track record of building effective business relationships.
• Strong Business acumen with the ability to understand and explain Procurement results and variances to non-Procurement audiences.
• Effective negotiator and influencer with demonstrated examples with internal stakeholders and external suppliers/partners.
• Ability to quickly develop organizational agility, e.g., knows how to get things done through formal and informal channels.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) and have an understanding for source-to-pay tools (SAP, Ariba, Workday, etc.).

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 NATAI@kraftheinz.com .