Senior Commercial Buyer

Job Description:
Senior Commercial Buyer - Enterprise Applications, Application Support and Professional Services

Venator is currently recruiting for a Senior Commercial Buyer - Enterprise Applications, Application Support and Professional Services to join its Purchasing team.

The Senior Commercial Buyer - Enterprise Applications, Application Support and Professional Services (based at Wynyard UK), will provide an effective IT vendor, contract sourcing and service across a global portfolio of IT Senior initiatives, assets, vendors and contracts. The Senior Commercial Buyer - Enterprise Applications, Application Support and Professional Services will play a key role in the optimisation of IT investment, realising greater business value through the combination of data driven insights, knowledge and experience of IT stakeholder requirements gathering, competitive sourcing, commercial negotiation, vendor relationship management and effective contract lifecycle management.

Job responsibilities include:

- Responsibility for an initial global IT contract portfolio value between $5-15m (per year) and for an annual sourcing requirement of $2.5 up to $10m per year supporting as contract lead a combination of both tactical and strategic contract, sourcing and digital transformation initiatives.
- Providing support for the Corporate Services Purchasing Manager (Head of Department) to raise awareness of and ensure compliance to purchasing business processes and procedures across the organisation.
- Conducting effective stakeholder relationship management through regular communication with and engagement of, both internal (leadership/management/operational) and external stakeholders (vendors/customers).
- Providing support and guidance to both the ‘IT Planning, Service Delivery & Operations’ and ‘IT Innovation & Transformation’ workstreams, to ensure effective sourcing and vendor selection is conducted, effective contracts are drafted and executed, and robust contract lifecycle management practices are applied to ensure value creation within all managed IT contracts/vendors.
- Supporting IT with scoping and requirements gathering, and vendor key performance indicators and service level development to ensure effective outcomes.
- Management of commercial risk, identification of commercial opportunities and realisation of commercial benefits, through use of market research, benchmarking, best practice commercial and contract lifecycle management techniques.
- Researching options and developing recommendations to ensure continuous service improvement across appointed IT Contracts, Vendors and Spend Categories.
- Supports group purchasing and legal departments to draft and execute appropriate contract terms.
- Experience of creating/drafting, amending and negotiating IT contracts/agreements including; master/sub
- agreements, statements of work/scope of service requirements and contract service schedules/service level agreements and improvement oriented key performance indicators are key requirements of this role.
- Developing and implementing effective contract risk management and risk mitigation procedures.
- Analysing exception data to identify potential breaches of policy and their causes; investigating, reporting and resolving contract compliancy issues and remediation options.
- Maintaining compliance to corporate standards and utilizing contract management methodology to realise commercial and service value for Venator.
- Ensuring that accurate, contract/vendor records are maintained and communicated to customers.
- Extensive experience of IT Sourcing, Contract and/or Vendor Management experience in a large (1000+ seat/headcount) Petrochemicals, FMCG or Manufacturing company or companies, with a global vendor, contracts and customer base.
- Experience of managing IT vendors and contracts and associated asset portfolios through complex mergers, acquisitions or divestments.
- Experience of IT sourcing specification/requirements development, the support (or facilitation) of competitive sourcing exercises (i.e. RFQ, RFP, ITT or equivalent) exercises.
- Demonstrable experience of effective vendor/contract lifecycle management and the delivery of continuous service improvements, commercial opportunity identification and benefit realisation
- Knowledge of laws, regulations, and industry best practices related to IT categories, contracts and products.
- Knowledge of different contractual / commercial models applied to IT software / hardware / services and an ability to communicate the benefits/drawbacks/opportunities presented by each.
- Knowledge of complex software licensing models and the benefits/risks associated with each.
- Strong analytical, data-gathering and problem-solving skills with a proven ability to analyse performance metrics and interpret customer requirements to translate into improvement focussed request for proposal specifications/scope of requirements documents.
- Strong communication/collabor