Associate Director, Ingredients - Commodities

Essential Functions & Responsibilities

• Build and maintain excellent relationships with mid- to executive-level clients and suppliers continuously to ensure customer satisfaction and increase influence over total category spend.

• Develop new capabilities for Kraft Heinz through people by hiring the right talent, ensuring clarity on the vision and jobs to be done, and driving engagement through effective coaching, guidance, and people development.

• Develop a category and sourcing strategy for a comprehensive portfolio of complex and critical categories to Kraft Heinz.

• Establish and deliver performance goals for a portfolio of categories representing a significant amount of spend.

• Lead strategic sourcing projects for supplier selection and optimization to execute Category Management vision and strategies, deliver on business needs based on data and insights and leveraging external best practices.

• Manage supplier relationships, facilitating Supplier Business Reviews, and act as a high-level escalation point for performance and risk issues.

• Lead discussions with critical suppliers around long-term objectives and strategies, ongoing market trends, innovation, and technological advances.

• Identify the most crucial supplier relationships in collaboration with operations and commercial; create a roadmap for improving or changing relationships for improved value aligned with category strategies.

• Be a thought leader and enabler for continuously improving internal and external routines and business processes.

• Manage a prioritized portfolio of projects for the category in the near and long term.

• Led the supplier selection and RFx award process by executing highly complex contracts following policies and processes, applying expert-level negotiation techniques and tools in all situations.

• Actively understand category dynamics (current market, pricing, cost drivers, industry, and supplier variables) through trade groups, publications, etc., and communicate changes to business stakeholders.

• Own, build, and deliver productivity and cash targets aligned with overarching goals and objectives, focusing on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

• Manage total cost of ownership at the category level through collaboration with data analytics and be accountable for measuring and reporting value delivery.

• Enable continuous process improvement and cost reduction.

• Ensure the strategic sourcing process is robustly applied to all sourcing projects.

• Collaborates with global procurement peers to ensure support and alignment with the supported functions.

People Management Responsibilities

• Team (salaried): 2 directs, 9 team members

Expected Experience & Required Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in supply chain management, finance, business, or equivalent. MBA and advanced Procurement qualifications preferred (CPM, CPIM, etc.). Candidates with equivalent experience will be considered.

• 7 to 10 years of direct Procurement experience, with a minimum of 5 years of commodities or ingredient commodities experience.

• Experience building high-performing teams by setting clear direction and priorities, leaning into coach and guide, empowering the team, and driving accountability.

• Strong Business acumen with the ability to understand and explain Procurement results and variances to non-Procurement audiences.

• 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.

• Effective negotiator and influencer with demonstrated examples with internal stakeholders and external suppliers/partners.

• Strong strategic thinker who considers various perspectives and impacts of issues and can project them into the future.

• Ability to quickly develop organizational agility, e.g., knows how to get things done through formal and informal channels and is an effective delegator.

• Ability to prioritize your time and others' time on what’s most important while eliminating roadblocks for the team, creating focus.

• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) and have an understanding for source-to-pay tools (SAP, Ariba, Workday, etc.).

Work Environment & Schedule

This position is considered a normal office environment with moderate travel to customer locations, stores, manufacturing facilities, etc.; offices are open workspaces. To create a more agile and modern workplace, we allow Chicago/Aon Center-based employees to work virtually for up to two days each week and expect them to work in person during the defined core days at their assigned work location at least three days per workweek.