Contracts Manager

Location: Plainsboro

About the Department

The Finance & Operations department brings insights and intelligence to inform decision making & drives digitalization and business solutions to attain NNI goals. Finance & Operations works closely across the organization to guide enterprise-wide resource allocations, investment choices, drive core operations and develop insights to drive growth and operational excellence across the value chain while innovating for future capabilities. Our focus on innovation ensures we're constantly building future capabilities.

We're responsible for regulating accounting, upholding workplace safety, managing our supply chain and sampling, supporting technological and data innovation, maintaining our facilities and assuring the integrity and completeness of all business transactions. At Novo Nordisk, you will have the opportunity to build a career in a global business environment. We encourage our employees to make the most of their talent, and we reward hard work and dedication with opportunities for continuous learning and personal development.

Are you ready to maximize your potential with us?

The Position

The Contract Manager role will be responsible for end-to-end processing of all in-scope service contracts with third-party vendors, across low, medium, high business risk and complexity, from intake to execution, in collaboration with SME reviewers, contract owners, requesters, and procurement category managers, and in line with Procurement policy. The end-to-end contract workflow process includes intake, draft, internal review, external negotiation, routing for financial approval, and signature execution.

In-scope contracts mainly include CDAs, MSAs, SOWs, short-form agreements, quality agreements, license agreements, and amendments. The role will be utilizing Procurement's Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform on a daily basis and will be at the frontline for driving continuous improvements in the contracting process and system, including providing input to SME-owned contracting playbooks and templates. The role will act as internal consultant to category managers in Procurement on in-scope contract legal matters and contract process.

Additionally, the role will execute specific Procurement processes such as MSA expiration management, Coupa-TPR look-up, etc.

Relationships

Reports to the Director for Contract Excellence and Sourcing Operations. Will regularly interact with enterprise-wide NNI stakeholders, and intermittently with Coupa Contract-to-Pay team members based in HQ. Stakeholder base will include contract owners and requesters, SME reviewers in Legal, Safety, Quality, Compliance, Data Privacy, IT, etc. Will interact with third-party vendors, and CLM vendors. Will closely collaborate and consult Procurement Category Management team members and leaders.

Essential Functions

* Determine appropriate 'contracting' vehicle, i.e. PO only, MSA-PO, SFA, etc., for incoming requests based on Procurement purchasing and contracting policies

* Review and analyze the contract intake form for completeness, accuracy; identify necessary SME reviewers such as Quality, Safety, Compliance, IT based on business understanding and risk assessment; collaborate with requesting business stakeholders as needed

* Triage special case contracts to Category Managers and Legal SME based on pre-defined criteria

* Draft and review contracts in compliance with contract playbooks from Legal, Compliance and other SME reviewers, and consult with / escalate to SME reviewers for off-playbook guidance

* Negotiate contract redlines with third-party vendors, serving as the primary point of contact and lead negotiator. Engage internal stakeholders in negotiation decisions. Orchestrate contracts through the negotiation process

* Provide guidance and explanation of risks in contract to internal stakeholders in procurement and the business

* Orchestrate contracts for approvals and signatures. Liaise with stakeholders on bottlenecks during approvals and the execution phase

* Provide ongoing input to SMEs on playbooks, templates and other internal contract guidance documents

* Assist with the development of training material and facilitate training sessions for business stakeholders, as needed

* Input key contract data into database applications to enable contract KPI tracking and insight generation

* Embrace use of technology such as agentic AI, assisted redlining, and other digital innovation

* Proactively identify continuous improvement opportunities in the contracting process, tools/forms, and system on an ongoing basis

* Execute specific contract processes such as MSA expiration management, terminated contract owner management, Coupa-TPR lookup, etc.

* Collaborate with Global on CLM new features and version updates

Physical Requirements

0-10% overnight travel required. Onsite presence required.

Qualifications

* Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience required

* Paralegal certification is a plus

* A minimum of 10 years of demonstrated contract…