Category Manager - BPO in London

The Role: Category Manager - BPO

At M&G, our purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. With a heritage dating back more than 175 years, we have a long history of innovation in savings and investments, combining asset management and insurance expertise to offer a wide range of solutions. Our two distinct operating segments, Asset Management and Life, work together to provide access to balanced, long-term investment and savings solutions.

Role Purpose

The Category Manager is the commercial owner of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) category and acts as an internal commercial consultant to the business. The postholder offers senior stakeholders three things: deep knowledge of the category and its supply market, strategic sourcing capability, and negotiation expertise. Using these, the postholder builds and owns the category strategy and savings plan, competes with vendors on commercial strategy, and influences how the business specifies and buys. Success is measured by realised cost reduction across the category and by the value the business places on Procurement's advice.

Context

M&G Procurement is on a transformation journey, our objectives include: Identifying and delivering material, recurring cost reduction on M&G third-party spend; and materially improving how the business experiences Procurement, measured through an internal NPS. To achieve these objectives, Procurement is moving from a business unit aligned, generalist model to a category structure that operates as an internal commercial consultancy.

Key Responsibilities

• Build, own and execute the category strategy for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), based on a detailed understanding of supply market structure, vendor commercial models, cost drivers and market trends.
• Maintain living category plans covering market analysis, supply base segmentation, demand profiling, route to market and savings opportunities.
• Develop commercial strategies for key vendors well ahead of renewal, so that M&G negotiates from a position of insight and has credible alternatives.
• Lead high-value sourcing events and negotiations, including setting the negotiation strategy, BATNA and walk-away position, managing concessions and holding positions with incumbents.
• Manage senior supplier relationships under commercial pressure.
• Design sourcing events and evaluation criteria, and decide how much process each event needs based on its value, risk and complexity.
• Introduce competitive tension into renewals and new commitments, moving from single-source and incumbent renewal to structured market engagement, preferred supplier frameworks and normalised rate cards.

Savings and Value Delivery

• Build and own the category savings plan against an agreed share of the group cost reduction target, sizing and prioritising opportunities by value and deliverability.
• Agree baselines and savings methodology with Finance before work starts, and follow savings through until they show in budgets and run rates.
• Build total cost of ownership and should-cost models, model the budget impact of sourcing options and how savings will be recognised in each department's P&L cost reports, and make sourcing recommendations on that basis.
• Use price, volume and demand levers, including rate reduction, volume aggregation, supplier consolidation and specification change.
• Challenge demand and specification using category and industry knowledge: question whether a requirement is needed at all, and at what volume, service level, specification and term; identify over-specification, duplicate purchasing and avoidable demand; and propose options such as a lower service tier, a shorter term or reuse of existing contracts, setting out the trade offs in commercial terms.
• Report savings and cost avoidance separately and accurately, and maintain a forward pipeline that gives Finance and the business visibility of upcoming activity.

Internal Consultancy and Stakeholder Influence

• Act as a trusted commercial adviser to senior business owners across the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) spend area, engaging early in their planning rather than at the point of purchase.
• Influence stakeholder decisions on sourcing, demand and specification without formal authority, and present category insight, evaluation and commercial recommendations to governance forums.
• Act as the Procurement relationship lead for nominated senior stakeholders.