Purchasing Centre of Excellence Lead

My client based in the West Midlands is keen to recruit a professional purchasing interim to lead their purchasing centre of excellence team.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Lead the Purchasing Centre of excellence team comprised of a team of subject matter experts and purchased service resources - currently 6 heads but planned to increase in 2015/16.
- Manage the Centre of Excellence team to ensure the following key objectives are delivered:-
- End to end business process support to the current Purchasing SAP process (P2P) to ensure business continuity. Act as point of escalation for technical issues raised by the business to the IT service delivery organisation. This support will include close interaction with both the IT and Finance CoE and business process owners/stakeholders.
- Working with Business process owners and stakeholders develop and manage the deliver required changes to the current SAP process to both address critical business issues and enable continual improvement initiatives. This will involve working cross-functionally to develop robust business cases and agree allocation of funding to purchasing change projects.
- Ensure appropriate governance is applied to Changes and Issue resolution through representation and interactions in the appropriate forums including - Steering Committees and cross-functional CoE forums.
- Ensure purchasing representation in appropriate governance forums to ensure quality of delivery of change requests.
- Provide change management to the purchasing business to ensure smooth deployment of business as usual changes. This should include appropriate impact assessment and the development of appropriate change plans.
- Provide high quality SAP training to the purchasing business
- Work with the Purchasing Transformation programme, purchasing business stakeholders and IT to understand future SAP requirements and assist in developing roadmaps/portfolio plans.
- Working with shared service teams across the business ensure that purchasing master data changes are managed and executed in a timely manner.
- Working with the Centre of Excellence teams contribute to the strategy and development of the CoE's to support global business expansion.
- Ensure smooth handover from SAP programmes to business as usual as these programmes exit respective hyper-care phases. Working with the SAP programme team also ensure that adequate resources are planned to support future programmes on the portfolio

SKILLS, EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS REQUIRED

- Degree-level qualification or equivalent in a relevant discipline.
- Strong leadership and man-management skills.
- Experience of leading teams in a large Multinational/Blue Chip environment
- Ability to coach team to assist in resolution of complex business process issues.
- Proven ability in managing a business process team in an SAP environment.
- Excellent process knowledge of the typical Non-Production purchasing processes' in a manufacturing/logistics environment.
- Excellent presentation skills and proven ability to present to Senior Management/Director level.
- Experience of managing purchased service providers both on and off-shore.

SKILLS, EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS PREFERABLE BUT NOT ESSENTIAL

- Working knowledge of accounts payable processes including OCR scanning and PO matching
- Experience of purchasing within an Manufacturing environment
- Played a key role in a significant Business Transformation programme

If you believe you have the skills and experience to perform to a high level in this role, please email me your CV today and i will call you to discuss your application.