Purchasing Advisor

We have an exciting new opportunity for a Purchasing Advisor to join Robert Walters as a Consultant. As an Employed Consultant, you will benefit from permanent employment with Robert Walters and will be deployed on an interim or project basis into our clients' organisations, in return we will provide you with an opportunity to develop your skills with ongoing training and professional accreditations!

The Opportunity:

Our client is a global mining company whose purpose is to reimagine mining to improve people's lives and is committed to creating a Living Mine that brings positive value to the people and environment where they operate. As Purchasing Advisor, you will join Supply Chain which is positioning itself for the future, by becoming more purpose-driven in aid of realizing the organisation's purpose and driving to be more agile and resilient.

Central to being more purpose-driven is delivering significantly more positive impact within our host communities, acting as supplier interface to provide velocity to our innovation, technical & sustainability change programme, that includes improved safety performance and the embedment of circular economy principles, as well as overall delivery of significantly more sustainable value.

To build a more agile and resilient Supply Chain, the commoditized execution and digitalization of processes is a key focus whilst driving operational excellence. The commercial team is responsible for the end-to-end management of all procurement activities within the South African region, including Regional Category Management, Sourcing & Contracts, Project Procurement and Purchasing.

The team works with regional business and Supply Chain stakeholders to implement and manage performance of contracts and suppliers, grow the host community supply base and ensure effective supply of goods and services required for operations. The purchasing team is responsible for the allocation of Source-of-Supply to purchasing requests, using a combination of automation and manual methods; management of the end-to-end transactional execution of Purchase Orders, driving for on time delivery of goods and service; delivering ongoing improvement in Purchasing to maximize first time right orders, improving user experience, reduce cycle time while maintaining appropriate risk and compliance in the end-to-end process.

The purpose of this role is to provide support with the purchasing activities to ensure that they are completed in a timely and cost-effective way, meeting agreed technical requirements and service levels, and providing implementation support to the team to ensure that all risk and compliance measures are adhered to.

Key Responsibilities:

• Adhere to the relevant Supply Chain strategy and ensure that critical tasks, performance targets, plans and budgets are adhered to with due consideration of risk identification.
• Embrace an agile Supply Chain by being adaptive and flexible to accommodate and focus on emerging and changing business priorities.
• Manage the estimation instructions that are provided to supplier.
• Provide guidance to the Repairs Analyst (Repairs Buyer) regarding the management of returned items that are beyond economical repair for scrapping.
• Track and report on purchasing performance levels for procurement activities and identify relevant improvement opportunities.
• Monitor the risk and compliance measures implemented by the team within the purchasing area of focus.
• Identify improvements in the execution of purchasing processes and implement accordingly.
• Recommend changes to purchasing channel usage.
• Maintain effective working relationships with suppliers, and resolve issues where required.
• Provide feedback where deliveries with due dates do not meet operational requirements.
• Identify continuous improvement opportunities.
• Ensure alignment to agreed supplier selection guidelines.
• Drive a culture of community development and inclusive procurement with stakeholders that are aligned to the global and regional Inclusive Procurement strategies.
• Support the team to identify supplier development needs and opportunities, and provide input into the development of solutions.

Key skills/experience:

• Transactional Purchasing Execution.
• SAP Purchasing and or AGB - Ariba Guarded Buying.
• Strong data analysis and reporting experience.
• Continuous improvement methodology.
• Process compliance monitoring expertise.
• Process performance monitoring expertise.
• Data analysis and reporting.
• Supplier Management expertise.
• Negotiation skills.
• Must have strong stakeholder management skills, ability to deal with challenging environments and overcome issues collaboratively.

This is a unique opportunity to join a forward-thinking organisation, don’t hesitate to apply!

We are committed to offering an inclusive recruitment experience. If you require accommodations because of disability or health condition, please email: gscemeaedi @ robertwalters.com.