MRO Purchasing Manager

MGP Ingredients is a leading supplier of premium distilled spirits and food ingredient solutions. Its Distilling Solutions segment provides bourbons, whiskeys, ryes, gins, and vodkas to craft and multinational brands. MGP's own Branded Spirts business is growing following the 2021 acquisition of Luxco, a top spirits producer, bottler, supplier, and importer as well as the 2023 acquisition of Penelope Bourbon, known for its wide range of uniquely blended expressions.

Ingredient Solutions delivers nutritional, functional wheat- and pea-based ingredients aligned with consumer trends. The company operates in locations across the Midwestern U.S., and overseas in Northern Ireland and Mexico.

Leads the assigned business unit’s maintenance, repair, and operations purchasing, inventory, and storeroom functions to ensure critical materials and services are available when needed to support safe, reliable, and cost-effective operations. Establishes purchasing and inventory controls, manages supplier performance and cost, mitigates supply and operational risk, develops assigned employees, and implements consistent enterprise MRO standards in partnership with Maintenance, Reliability, Engineering, Operations, Finance, and Procurement.

• Lead the purchasing of indirect MRO materials, parts, equipment, repairs, and services within delegated authority and company policy.
• Develop sourcing strategies; solicit and evaluate quotations; negotiate commercial terms; and select suppliers based on total value, quality, service, delivery, safety, and risk.
• Review requisitions and purchase orders for accuracy, approvals, specifications, contract requirements, and appropriate sourcing practices.
• Coordinate urgent and critical purchases and establish contingency sources to minimize production and maintenance disruption.

• Establish inventory controls and business-unit stocking strategies aligned with equipment criticality, preventive and predictive maintenance plans, lead time, failure risk, replacement availability, and operational impact.
• Manage cycle counts, annual inventories, reconciliation, inventory optimization, and excess and obsolete inventory reviews.
• Ensure storerooms are secure, organized, labeled, and maintained in accordance with safety and housekeeping standards.
• Establish common item-naming, classification, unit-of-measure, manufacturer-part-number, storage-location, and approved-source standards.
• Identify duplicate items and opportunities to standardize materials across equipment, departments, and business units.
• Approve or govern new-item creation and changes to minimum, maximum, reorder-point, safety-stock, and criticality settings.
• Establish and periodically review critical-spare designations based on equipment criticality, lead time, failure risk, replacement availability, and operational impact.
• Develop mitigation plans for long-lead, obsolete, single-source, and high-risk materials.

• Monitor supplier performance for safety, quality, delivery, responsiveness, cost, and compliance; address deficiencies and elevate material risks.
• Identify and document savings, cost avoidance, standardization, repair-versus-replace, warranty, and vendor-managed inventory opportunities.
• Partner with enterprise Procurement on contracts, preferred suppliers, competitive bids, category strategies, and cross-business-unit sourcing opportunities.
• Coordinate with Safety, Quality, Engineering, Legal, Finance, and Procurement, as applicable, to ensure suppliers and service providers meet technical, commercial, insurance, safety, quality, and compliance requirements.
• Ensure contractors and service suppliers satisfy applicable site-access, safety, insurance, and documentation requirements before work begins.
• Establish controls for repairable assets, including repair history, warranty tracking, turnaround time, repair-versus-replace analysis, and final disposition.

• Maintain purchasing and inventory procedures, segregation of duties, delegated authority, approval controls, and audit-ready records.
• Maintain effective ERP and/or CMMS processes and data quality for items, suppliers, purchase orders, receipts, inventory transactions, and equipment applicability.
• Establish controls for item creation, item-master changes, approved sources, stocking levels, and purchasing transactions.
• Track and report…