Transportation Manager

Transportation Performance Manager

This is where your work makes a difference.

At Baxter, we believe every person—regardless of who they are or where they are from—deserves a chance to live a healthy life. It was our founding belief in 1931 and continues to be our guiding principle. We are redefining healthcare delivery to make a greater impact today, tomorrow, and beyond.

Our Baxter colleagues are united by our Mission to Save and Sustain Lives. Together, our community is driven by a culture of courage, trust, and collaboration. Every individual is empowered to take ownership and make a meaningful impact. We strive for efficient and effective operations, and we hold each other accountable for delivering exceptional results.

Here, you will find more than just a job—you will find purpose and pride.

The Transportation Performance Manager plays a critical role in enabling Baxter's healthcare supply chain by providing end-to-end financial visibility, analytical insight, and disciplined cost management across a $300M+ transportation portfolio.

This role serves as the primary link between fulfillment operations, freight payment, and finance—translating complex operational, commercial, and macroeconomic inputs into clear financial insight, risk identification, and actionable opportunities. Partnering closely with fulfillment and finance leadership, the Transportation Performance Manager helps ensure continuity of supply while driving sound, data-driven decisions that balance service, cost, and risk.

Success in this role requires strong transportation domain knowledge, advanced financial and analytical capability, and the ability to operate effectively in complex and sometimes ambiguous environments. The individual must be able to synthesize large datasets into meaningful narratives and confidently communicate insights to senior leadership.

Transportation Performance Management

• Provide clear, accurate visibility into $300M+ of transportation spend across modes, regions, and programs.
• Track, forecast, and report freight costs while ensuring strong alignment between operational activity and financial outcomes.
• Analyze key freight cost drivers, including rates, accessorials, volume shifts, mode changes, service failures, fuel impacts, and network changes.
• Partner with fulfillment leadership to understand operational decisions and their financial implications, while identifying opportunities for efficiency and cost improvement.
• Support the development, validation, and tracking of transportation cost-saving initiatives to ensure benefits are clearly defined and realized.
• Serve as a liaison with finance to ensure transportation performance is clearly reflected in the P&L, including gap analysis and corrective actions as needed.

Freight Pay, Accruals & Financial Controls

• Own and manage freight accrual data from systems such as Trax / D2L, leveraging analytical models and dashboards.
• Oversee freight pay and accrual processes, including month-end close support, variance analysis, and true-up activities.
• Audit freight invoices to ensure accuracy, adherence to contracted rates, and timely resolution of discrepancies.
• Collaborate with finance to strengthen controls that ensure financial accuracy, audit readiness, and compliance with internal policies.
• Identify and address root causes of accrual inaccuracies, including late invoices, duplicate payments, and other cost leakage risks.

Analytics & Decision Support

• Develop analytical models and tools to support freight spend analysis, forecasting, and scenario modeling.
• Translate complex and incomplete datasets into actionable insights for fulfillment and finance leadership.
• Produce recurring and ad hoc reporting with clear narratives explaining trends, risks, and mitigation actions.
• Support business cases for network, sourcing, or operational changes by quantifying cost, service, and risk trade-offs.

Cross-Functional Partnership & Continuous Improvement

• Act as a key connector across fulfillment, finance, planning, commercial, and customer service teams.
• Influence stakeholders to adopt financially sound operational decisions, balancing cost and service…