Procurement Excellence Manager – Functional Excellence

Location: Greater London

** About the role
** We have a great opportunity for a Procurement Excellence Manager – Functional Excellence role here at DS Smith. The role is responsible to drive and embed functional excellence, ensuring the day-to-day operational efficiency and effectiveness of the whole Procurement community.

As the Procurement Excellence Manager - Functional, you will report to the Head of Procurement Excellence within the Group Procurement Function.

As the successful candidate you will be responsible for building and operating functional ways of working to ensure the efficient and effective day-to-day operation of the function, focusing on simplicity, quality and engagement across the whole Procurement community.

You will collaborate with your procurement colleagues to:
* Drive process excellence: defining and leading initiatives to simplify, improve user experience and reduce non-value add activity, across the function
* Procurement Community and colleague engagement: foster an integrated business partner culture, valued across the function
* Evolve the maturity of Procurement practices in line with external benchmarks and functional needs.
* Simplify:
Drive towards clear, consistent and logical processes, tools, templates and policies which are easier to navigate
* Bring the best of the outside practices in: defining and driving the execution of a multi year improvement roadmap, endorsed by the Procurement leadership. Includes setting ambitious and measurable KPIs and targets to improvement vs benchmarks
* Developing strategies to enhance compliance and reduce risk, in alignment with group priorities, whilst make it easier to comply with controls, policies and standards
*
* Key responsibilities:

**** Functional Governance and Operation
*** Deliver and coordinate the Procurement Governance plan and process
* Drive initiatives to simplify, improve colleague experience and reduce non-value add activity across the Procurement community
** Improving Maturity
*** For functional process areas, develop and define a 1-3 year functional maturity roadmap in partnership with the business and procurement leaders. Align on target setting: KPIs and goals, leveraging external best practice insights.
* Lead the adoption of best practices and improved process maturity- bringing the best of the outside in. Enlist support, innovation and commitment from across the Procurement community.
* In collaboration with the Technology function, support the definition of key requirements and the successful deployment of digital solutions for procurement teams and business stakeholders. Partner with Technology to develop compelling investment business cases and to align on investment slate priorities and investments
* Generate insights and opportunities from internal and external benchmarking across key processes, embed governance to regularly review and improvement of core processes, tools and templates
** Functional Improvement Programme Delivery
*** Collaborate with the team to prioritise and deliver a programme of enablement initiatives, in alignment with agreed priorities
* Accountability to ensure that core process requirements are effectively digitised (per aligned Digital Roadmap), with support from Technology and Programme Delivery teams.
** Functional Communications
*** In partnership with the Internal Comms team, plan and deliver the functional comms plan
* Drive and maintain colleague engagement, including through the timely creation and distribution of Procurement Leadership summaries and updates
* Maintain all Procurement Community channel(s) e.g. Share Point
** Procurement Programme Delivery and Performance Management
*** Design, build and deliver a fit for purpose Procurement Performance environment e.g. Procurement delivery pipeline governance, challenger sessions and schedules
* Develop new performance reporting / scorecards – in partnership with Finance and the Procurement Services Hub
** Procurement Learning and Development
*** In partnership with the Learning and Development (HR) team, plan and deliver the functional L&D plan
* Build new and refresh current functional playbooks
* Build and deliver new digital learning tools and platforms…