Essential Duties:
Essential duties are descriptive and not restrictive in nature. Other duties may be assigned.
- Safety, compliance and governance: Perform all work safely and promote a safe working environment. Maintain strict adherence to the Code of Conduct, Product Compliance Policy, purchasing controls, delegated authority limits, quality standards, and all applicable laws and regulations.
- Team leadership and development: Lead, coach, and develop the buying team; establish clear roles, priorities, service expectations, performance measures, and succession plans. Allocate workload effectively and ensure appropriate coverage across plants, suppliers, and product categories.
- Hands-on purchasing execution: Remain actively involved in day-to-day purchasing, including purchase requisition review, purchase-order placement, order confirmations, expedites, shortages, late orders, substitutions, supplier communication, invoice discrepancies, and issue resolution.
- SAP and MRP ownership: Own purchasing execution through SAP and ensure MRP is used as the primary driver of material requirements and purchase-order activity. Establish routines to review MRP exceptions, reschedule messages, shortages, past-due orders, forecast consumption, and inventory risks.
- Single source of truth: Drive adoption of SAP as the single source of truth for suppliers, lead times, pricing, minimum order quantities, lot sizes, source lists, purchasing information records, contracts, open purchase orders, delivery dates, and material planning parameters. Reduce reliance on offline trackers and uncontrolled spreadsheets.
- Automation and process efficiency: Identify, prioritize, and implement SAP, workflow, reporting, and purchasing automation opportunities that reduce manual effort, improve control, accelerate decision-making, and increase data accuracy. Partner with IT, Finance, Operations, and divisional teams to deliver sustainable process improvements.
- Planning parameter accuracy: Partner with Plant Managers, Supply Chain leads, planners, and Finance to maintain appropriate safety stocks, reorder points, lot sizes, lead times, procurement types, and other MRP parameters for raw materials and purchased finished goods.
- Supplier management: Establish and maintain strong supplier relationships. Monitor delivery, quality, responsiveness, capacity, risk, and commercial performance using structured scorecards and regular business reviews.
- Sourcing and commercial negotiations: Lead or support sourcing events, negotiations, contracts, payment terms, freight terms, rebates, and cost-reduction initiatives. Ensure purchasing decisions reflect total delivered cost, quality, supply continuity, working capital, and strategic fit.
- Cost and productivity initiatives: Develop and deliver a measurable pipeline of purchase-price variance, cost avoidance, specification optimization, alternate sourcing, payment-term, inventory, and process-efficiency initiatives.
- Inventory and working capital: Balance material availability with working-capital requirements. Review excess, obsolete, slow-moving, and at-risk inventory and lead actions to prevent accumulation, improve turns, and manage supplier commitments.
- Supply risk and continuity: Identify critical materials and suppliers, assess capacity and supply risks, and maintain appropriate mitigation plans, alternate sources, contractual protections, and escalation processes.
- Forecast and supplier communication: Translate demand forecasts, production plans, and MRP requirements into timely supplier forecasts and purchase commitments. Communicate material constraints and risks clearly to Operations, Sales, Finance, and leadership.
- Purchase-order and control discipline: Ensure all purchases are supported by approved purchase orders, correct pricing, appropriate quantities, valid approvals, and accurate delivery dates. Establish controls for confirmations, changes, blanket orders, spot buys, and invoice matching.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with Operations, Quality, Engineering, Finance, Commercial, Logistics, IT, and divisional procurement teams to support launches, trials, substitutions, plant changes, and business-wide improvement initiatives.
- Reporting and performance management: Develop and maintain purchasing KPIs, including supplier on-time delivery, past-due purchase orders, purchase-price variance, savings, inventory exposure, MRP exceptions, expedite activity, data accuracy, and team productivity. Provide clear and actionable reporting to leadership.
- Issue escalation and resolution: Resolve significant supplier, quality, invoice, delivery, pricing, capacity, or contractual issues promptly. Escalate material risks early and lead cross-functional recovery actions.
- Group and divisional alignment: Collaborate with Kingspan Group and divisional procurement teams to implement group sourcing strategies, leverage scale, share best practices, and provide required reporting.
- Sustainability: Support Planet Passionate and responsible-sourcing objectives by incorporating sustainability, compliance, and supplier-risk considerations into purchasing decisions.
Supervisory Responsibilities
Directly manages the buying team and carries out supervisory responsibilities in accordance with company policies and applicable laws. Responsibilities include hiring, onboarding, training, coaching, setting objectives, monitoring performance, approving work, resolving issues, and developing team capability and succession coverage.
Qualifications
Education: Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain, Business, Operations, Finance, Engineering, or a related discipline. Equivalent relevant experience may be considered.
Experience: Minimum 7 years of progressive purchasing, materials management, or supply-chain experience in a manufacturing environment, including at least 2 years leading or supervising a purchasing team.
Systems: Strong SAP purchasing and MRP experience is required. Experience with SAP S/4HANA, Fiori, workflow automation, Power BI, or related reporting and process-improvement tools is preferred.
Technical Knowledge: Strong understanding of MRP, purchase-to-pay, supplier management, inventory planning, forecasting, contracts, sourcing, manufacturing operations, and working-capital management.
Commercial capability: Demonstrated ability to negotiate supplier pricing, terms, contracts, and service expectations and to quantify savings, cost avoidance, and total-cost impacts.
Required Skills, Knowledge and Abilities:
- Strong leadership, coaching, delegation, and performance-management skills.
- Highly analytical, financially literate, and able to translate data into clear purchasing actions.
- Demonstrated ability to improve purchasing processes, system usage, master data, and controls.
- Strong attention to detail with disciplined follow-through and a bias for timely execution.
- Ability to prioritize urgent supply issues while continuing to advance strategic initiatives.
- Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence plant and functional leaders.
- Effective supplier negotiation, conflict resolution, and relationship-management skills.
- Ability to remain calm under pressure and lead cross-functional resolution of complex supply issues.
- High integrity and ability to maintain confidential commercial information.
- Ability to work independently and manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced, multi-site environment.
Key Performance Indicators:
- Supplier on-time delivery and past-due purchase orders
- Material shortages, stockouts, expedites, and production interruptions
- Purchase-price variance, validated savings, and cost avoidance
- Inventory turns, excess and obsolete inventory, and working-capital performance
- MRP exception closure and planning-parameter accuracy
- Purchase-order accuracy, confirmation discipline, and invoice-match performance
- SAP master-data completeness and reduction in offline purchasing trackers
- Supplier quality, responsiveness, and risk-management performance
- Buying-team service levels, productivity, capability, and development
Work Environment and Physical Requirements:
The role is primarily office-based and requires regular use of a computer and telephone, frequent interaction with manufacturing sites and suppliers, and travel averaging approximately 20-30% as business needs require. The employee may occasionally enter manufacturing and warehouse environments and must comply with all site-specific safety and personal protective equipment requirements. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the role.
Compliance Obligations:
- Remain compliant with the Code of Conduct and all company policies, including the Product Compliance Policy.
- Ensure all duties related to product compliance are performed in accordance with company policy, laws, regulations, and market requirements.
- Complete all assigned actions required to support the Compliance Management System.
- Promptly raise compliance concerns to a supervisor, manager, member of the Leadership Team, or through the confidential whistleblower service.
Equal Opportunity Employer
This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights (https://www.eeoc.gov/poster) notice from the Department of Labor.
