Strategic Vendor, Partner Manager

The Strategic Partner Manager, a member of Cengage s Global Procurement (GP) team, negotiates pricing agreements, order forms, and other commercial contracts with third-party vendors, service providers, and outsourcing partners for teams across Cengage. Finally, the role performs analysis that supports decision-making related to the sourcing of services, service provider capabilities and capacity, and the efficient mix of resources needed to support Cengage s operations.

This position requires working several hours each week that overlap with the United States business day.

• Negotiate purchasing agreements with Cengage s third-party partners
• Prepare both straightforward SOWs and amendments to SOWs and MSAs
• Conduct RFPs, RFQs, and RFIs
• Build reports that support sourcing-related decision-making

• Draft RFP, SOW, SLAs, and price submission documents
• Distribute RFPs to suppliers and answer their questions
• Write summaries of RFP responses
• Negotiate, finalize, and route agreements for signature
• Maintain and update purchasing documentation and trackers
• Initiate renewals with adequate time for decision-making
• Collect, normalize, synthesize, and analyze quantitative, qualitative, and financial data
• Write summaries and reports that draw conclusions from data and support decision-making around operational improvements and sourcing priorities
• Develop and implement recurring and ad hoc reports and data visualizations that facilitate and optimize operational understanding
• Perform basic predictive modeling of the cost impact of alternative sourcing scenarios
• Write targeted, concise, and persuasive solution-focused presentations
• Collaborate with teams in Product Technology & Innovation, Product Management, Finance, and other functional areas to develop Key Performance Indicators and scorecards that measure and validate vendor performance against targets and promote continuous improvement.
• Provide end-user support and education in the creation and approval of purchase orders and the approval of invoices in SAP ERP

• Bachelor s degree or relevant experience
• Demonstrated ability in publishing, education technology, management consulting, business process outsourcing/procurement, and/or financial analysis
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to report effectively to management
• Shown critical thinking and analytical skills
• Strong communication skills and attention to detail
• Collaboration, facilitation, and consensus-building skills
• Consistent record of handling confidential information in a professional manner
• Experience with survey tools/applications for data collection
• Skilled in the use of proprietary and/or off-the-shelf databases and reporting / dashboarding tools
• Ability to self-manage progress against goals in a virtual work environment with partners around the globe
• Ability to generate results with a high degree of accountability
• Experienced with all Office 365 applications (Word; PowerPoint; Excel; Outlook; Teams)
• Skilled in working with text and numeric data in Microsoft Excel

• MBA or equivalent experience in management consulting, procurement, operations management, and/or finance. Knowledge of SAP ERP S4 Hana.
• Experience with developing Smartsheet- and PowerBI-based forms, dashboards, and reports