ESM Lead

1. Manages a project or workstreams within a broader project or program. Develops, implements, and monitors project plans. Contributes expertise to major project deliverables, milestones, and required tasks.
2. Provides insight on best practices and common obstacles based on prior experiences. Ensures strategies are aligned with the overall department strategy.
3. Communicates project status and issues regularly to stakeholders, including leaders, team members, and senior managers. Interpret and communicate contract requirements, obligations, and risk exposures to key stakeholders, including sourcing professionals and business leaders.
4. Builds and maintains effective relationships. Proactively fosters communication between internal and external project stakeholders. Influences key decisions across stakeholder groups.
5. Proactively identifies, manages, and mitigates risks and any related project issues. Communicates solutions on key issues or projects to management and stakeholders to obtain their input and buy-in as appropriate.
6. Provides thought leadership and oversight to support engagement strategy and delivers guidance on OKR/Right Start strategic directions to support ESMs overall goals/key initiatives.
7. Directs strategic planning and makes key decisions that provide strategic direction for the Business and ESM, including category and supplier strategies. Leverages data analytics and insights in such strategies that are aligned to business priorities and forecasting. Prepares and presents strategic analysis, findings, and potential solutions into actionable recommendations. Crafts data into a compelling storyline with actionable insight for the senior management.
8. Maintains accordance with industry best practice/trends, defines standards within ESM in the space of competitive bidding, contracting and supplier management. Understands regulatory requirements. Directly partners with Legal, Risk and other partners to understand key concerns and opportunities for their specifics functions.
9. Leads and executes all transaction types, including highly complex and impactful strategic negotiations, competitive bids (performs supply market data analysis and recommends suppliers to the business), and product/services analyses.
10. Ensures proper closure of transactions including the successful handoff to purchasing and payables associates, the validation that suppliers will comply with agreed-upon payment terms, and that the contracting team receives documents in good order.
11. Partners with leaders to define problem, issues, and planned approach for research and analyses. This includes negotiations and supplier selection for products and services. Manages contracts and relationships for suppliers within categories, including, but not limited to: Technology, Human Resources, Professional Services and Facilities.
12. Follow and champion global procurement process compliance. Educate key stakeholders about commercial, compliance, legal, policy and other considerations in support of the contract negotiation or supplier management process. Creates and leads training of and supports adherence to procurement policies and procedures. Ensures application of fair business practices and procurement of products and services at the best execution and price.
13. Works directly with Third Party Risk Management, Risk Domain Groups (e.g. Global Privacy, InfoSec, Compliance, Business Continuity, Financial Crimes, Artificial Intelligence, etc.) and other groups as required to create and augment existing Standard Operating Procedures and RACIs.
14. Participates in special projects and performs other duties as assigned (e.g. Respond to internal audit requests).
15. Support/ lead Onboarding of new suppliers as well as offboarding including any transitional programs/ projects will be required.
16. End to end contract management (Full lifecycle)
17. Setting up and agreeing Governance for ongoing supplier relationship management with stakeholders/business partners

Qualifications

• Minimum of 8-12 years related work experience, including leading contract negotiations and running competitive RFQ/RFI/RFPs.
• Financial Services and/or Technology specific experience preferred.
• Undergraduate degree or equivalent combination of training and experience. Graduate degree preferred.
• Flexible work hours are required to work with stakeholders across regions in different time zones. This is about 10%-20% per week.
• Strong communication and relationship management skills are required. Ability to escalate proactively.
• Strong data analysis, reporting and presentation skills are required.