Global Procurement Category Specialist, Flavors, Sugar, Enzymes

**Permanent**

**Closing date:** 8th February

**Location:** hybrid working from either London, Edinburgh, Dublin or Plainfield

With over 200 brands sold in nearly 180 countries, we’re the world’s leading premium drinks company. Bring your passion and use your curiosity as you explore, collaborate, and innovate to build brands consumers love. Together with passionate people from all over the world, you’ll test new ideas, learn and grow, and unlock a brighter, more exciting future. Join us to create a career worth celebrating!

**About the Function**

Our Procurement team are innovators, always seeking new ways to help our business, people and much-loved brands thrive. We’re dedicated to maximising the £12 billion+ we spend every year, building brands of premium quality, while creating sustainable value and growth. Together, we’re shaping the services, partnerships and innovations that meet our future needs. Our procurement team delivers outstanding end-to-end value across our supply chain and offers innovative supplier solutions. Together, we’re driving our 'Society 2030: Spirit of Progress' plan across suppliers and agency partners to create a more sustainable world. Wherever you choose to carve your career, we’ll support and encourage you in our inclusive culture.

**About the role**

Deliver Procurement outcomes for Diageo within one or more categories of spend, through effective business partnering and collaboration across Procurement CoEs. This includes (but is not limited to):

• Applying strategic procurement excellence through creation of or support in creation of category strategies built on Diageo’s best methods, standards, and tools to deliver procurement value.
• Leading or supporting Sourcing activities for specific categories of spend procured Globally.
• Developing subject-matter expertise for specific spend categories, supporting collection and leverage of supply market expertise and clear direction to Analysts for development and application of supply market data and information to strategy development and sourcing.

The Global Category Specialist is accountable for driving and active participation in a global community of procurement professionals in one or more spend categories, including joining regular meetings, driving alignment around strategy, supporting development of own and others’ capabilities & expertise and sharing of best practices.

**Key responsibilities**

• Applied expertise. Build, manage and grow expertise in one or more spend categories, including understanding of supply markets, suppliers, partners and how to negotiate supply and demand. Become a subject-matter expert and share with others in a global community of category professionals. Apply expertise and standards to identify and win new value for Diageo.
• Category excellence. Lead development of best-in-class market intelligence and knowledge, category strategies and sourcing events by applying Diageo standards for category excellence. Contribute to improvement of existing and development of new tools & techniques.
• Business partnering. Develop and grow relationships with stakeholders, partners, and suppliers for deeper insights into needs and capabilities; articulate requirements and deliver insights for greater value from stakeholder collaboration.
• Strategy development. For one or more spend categories, support development and evolution of category strategies by (1) capturing, articulating, and confirming business requirements; (2) researching and analysing market dynamics; and (3) assessing opportunities and proposing solutions.
• Best in class capabilities. Generate insights and opportunities from internal and external benchmarking, develop cost models to consider scenarios with suppliers and partners and build & evolve analytics capabilities that allow regular review and improvement of strategies.
• Sourcing. Implement sourcing activities for Global and above-market leverage spend categories. Engage community members as required, apply Diageo Procurement protocol standard.
• Contracting. For relevant sourcing projects, ensure effective planning, preparation, and application of the Negotiation Toolkit. Negotiate and close contracts. Enter contracts into the system. Manage contracts and contract compliance (Diageo customer compliance and Supplier compliance) through contract lifecycles.
• Mitigate strategic risks. As part of category strategy execution, identify, record and follow-up risk mitigations in line with category strategies and procedure.
• Mitigate sourcing risks. Identify corporate, supply, supplier and other risks associated with sourcing activities, put mitigations in place and implement them, engaging all relevant stakeholders, partners, and suppliers to ensure the mitigations are successful.
• Apply and improve tools & techniques. Apply Diageo protocol standard, ensuring the most recent and relevant approaches are always applied; use formal governance and peer review to ensure the quality and efficacy of risk management; contribute to development of standards.
• Supplier relationship. Establish standards, ways of working and trust relationships with Global suppliers in relevant categories; ensure Diageo protocols are applied and that there is a good foundation for strong performance, risk mitigation and rapid resolution of issues.
• Supplier performance. Support Market COE’s with driving consistency across suppliers and markets, improving the value of data generated.
• Supplier development. In line with Procurement strategic supplier strategies, collaborate with suppliers to unlock breakthrough opportunities for the business; stimulate supplier capabilities to generate ideas for the future.

**Experience, skills & capabilities required**

• Significant experience in Procurement with subject-matter expertise in supply markets and spend categories relevant to the role.
• Demonstrated performance in projects and in cross-market teams, experience developing and implementing category and procurement strategies, managing and negotiating with suppliers.
• Strong analytical and financial awareness including a strong understanding of AOP requirements and financial goals & value drivers relevant to the categories in scope.
• Track record of generating insights to influence decision-making; good commercial foresight.
• Good systems knowledge (esp. SAP, M/S Office, E-collaborate or similar systems & tools).
• Strong verbal, written and presentation skills; strong interpersonal skills.
• Track record of consistent performance and delivery.

**Working with Us**

Flexibility is key to success in our business and many of our staff work flexibly in many different ways, including part-time, compressed hours, flexible location. Please talk to us about what flexibility means to you and don’t let anything stop you from applying.

Join us and you can also expect a highly competitive and flexible rewards and benefits package including:

• Competitive base salary and bonus scheme
• Contemporary work life balance policies and wellbeing activities
• Contributory pension scheme
• Comprehensive health insurance for you and your family
• Share options

Celebrating our inclusive and diverse culture is core to Diageo’s purpose of “celebrating life every day everywhere”. This purpose is inclusive in nature, as it values everybody irrespective of background, disability, religion, gender identity, sexuality or ethnicity.

We know that for our business to thrive and for Diageo to realize its ambition, we depend on having diverse.