Category Specialist

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The Toro Company is a homegrown, Minnesota-based company that has been in business since 1914. We pride ourselves on providing world‑class equipment to help maintain the environment that we love, while putting an emphasis on giving back to the communities that surround us. From residential lawns and gardens, to venues such as St Andrews Links and Target Field, we are a company with a global footprint and a passion for helping people beautify whatever landscape they may be in.

With 100 years of operation under our belt and a healthy tenure, come find out what makes The Toro Company the best place to build a career.

The Category Specialist is an integral role in the sourcing department, often collaborating with every position within the Integrated Supply Chain (ISC) to help ISC achieve its goals of Operational Excellence and Sustainability. The Category Specialist’s major responsibilities are reducing costs, cultivating strategic supplier relationships, improving quality and delivery metrics, supporting continuous improvement projects, and growing the skills and knowledge needed for advancement into a Category Management position and beyond.

This role blends tactical and strategic capabilities, with a heavy focus on the strategic, within the global sourcing department and significantly impacts the day‑to‑day operations and the long‑term strategic goals of The Toro Company (TTC). The Category Specialist role demonstrates the ability to lead key responsibilities and is deemed an expert in their role. This role is highly engaging and can also provide opportunities to explore additional future career paths within our dynamic Sourcing department.

• Enhance and grow supplier relationships through excellent communication to ensure the supplier’s alignment with ISC’s goals.
• Support development and implementation of supply agreements, Long Term Agreements (LTA), and collaborative partnerships.
• Execute category team’s cost reduction strategy through supplier negotiations and partnership with cross‑functional teams. Complete and review total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis and provide guidance to category team and leadership.
• Lead, understand, and execute category specific strategy by using past experiences and drawing upon historical data to draw conclusions and pivot strategy within the category to align with ISC strategy.
• Collaborate and partner with Category Manager(s) in cost negotiations and contract implementation with strategic suppliers.
• Lead negotiations, develop and implement cost reduction initiatives of non‑strategic spend suppliers.
• Research, identify and determine new suppliers that align with Toro values and select the best possible supplier for a part based on the supplier classification criteria set by category team’s strategy.
• Lead and support supplier transitions. Participate and advise in supplier exit process standardization and continuous improvement projects.
• Analyze quote packages from suppliers using the TCO model with the support of the category team to select the appropriate supplier.
• Collaborate with engineering on strategic initiatives and ensure engineering change notices (ECN’s/ECO’s) are completed timely.
• Support category manager to reconcile monthly purchase price variance (PPV). Identify root cause for variances and improve controls to minimize those.
• Lead monthly reconciliation of PPV of 10-15% of category spend.
• Ability to troubleshoot unique issues that arise of moderate to advanced complexity.
• Drive continuous…