Indirect Procurement Business Partner

Company Description

As a world market leader in crop protection, we help farmers to counter these threats and ensure enough safe, nutritious, affordable food for all – while minimizing the use of land and other agricultural inputs. Syngenta Crop Protection keeps plants safe from planting to harvesting.  From the moment a seed is planted through to harvest, crops need to be protected from weeds, insects and diseases as well as droughts and floods, heat and cold. Syngenta Crop Protection is headquartered in Switzerland.

Job Description

Role purpose

The purpose of this role is to manage Indirect Procurement function as a Business Partner within a dedicated geograpy.

• Accountable for a Business/Site or Function Unit within Syngenta Group's AMEA Region’s TAMERUK Sub-Region
• Delivers a key service as a team player or leads complex and significant procurement tasks and projects at country or inter-country scope.
• Takes independent action to deliver short-term goals.
• Focuses on the procurement of a portfolio of spend, leveraging Category/Sub-Category strategies and Buying Channels.
• Leads and manages the end-to-end sourcing activities within the countries.
• Procures an assigned portfolio of spend ensuring secure, on-time, on-specification supply, delivering minimum total cost of ownership.
• Builds relationships with stakeholders, regional teams, and delivers saving targets and quality.
• Performs specialized duties in a defined functional program area, involving a wide variety of problems.
• Acts as an expert source of information on processing transactions.
• Works closely with business leaders to ensure the dedicated countries’ business requirements are clearly understood and challenged, and taken account of in the Category strategies (Demand management).
• Forges close working relationships with Category/Sub-Category Managers to ensure strategies are fully deployed across the region.
• Develops and maintains close working relationships with various business leaders to ensure Indirect Procurement delivers significant savings consistently.
• Provides tailored Procurement solutions for the business when requirements cannot be met by Category/Sub-Category strategy or existing buying channels.
• Acts as an ambassador of Procurement and Global Sourcing, championing Procurement policies, processes, and tools.
• Represents multiple functions and sites within the sub-region/country, collaborating with AMEA members and regional sourcing teams to drive procurement excellence.
• Continuous self development to meet the requirements.

Key elements of the role include but are not be limited to:

• Manages end-to-end sourcing activities within countries, aligning with category strategies.
• Builds relationships with stakeholders and regional teams, ensuring compliance with procurement policies and process  including tendering and contract management.
• Develops and manages relationships with key suppliers, including negotiation and contract management.
•  Deploys category and sub-category strategies within the country, ensuring alignment with management teams.
•  Designs and executes tailored procurement solutions where standard strategies or channels are insufficient.
• Optimizes vendor relationships and utilizes e-tools effectively to leverage value and promote catalog usage.
• Manages budgets and resources allocated to procurement activities.
•  Verifies and agrees on financial performance within the country, including savings delivery and budget data.
• Delivers agreed savings targets while maintaining quality and meeting time requirements.
• Works closely with business leaders to understand and address requirements, ensuring alignment with category strategies.
• Communicates effectively with stakeholders, providing regular reports on achievements, issues, and constraints.
• Develops a strong procurement stakeholder network within the organization, educating on policies and processes.
• Actively engages in continuous self-development to meet requirements.
• Focuses on sustainability throughout the procurement process.
• Develops and promotes catalogue usage for process optimization.
• Set clear timelines and milestones for procurement objectives.
•  Implement risk management strategies to mitigate potential disruptions in the supply chain.
• Requires in-depth knowledge and experience in own discipline including mastery of techniques/methods/scientific theories and subject matter expertise
•  Solves complex problems and may be required to develop solutions to problems newly arising
• work on project sourcing, spend analysis, detailed understanding of the supply market(s) and internal business requirements, implement Category strategy achieving the agreement and saving target.
•  Typically coordinates and supervises the daily activities, production or operations team of non-professionals level, may allocate work, sets priorities to ensure task completion, coordinates work activities with other supervisors; provides subject matter guidance to other team members.
• To provide local market knowledge / intelligence / expertise for components within the portfolio to team, stakeholders and other country, regional and global category managers.
• Be the face of procurement to the country management team, ensuring they are aware of and actively support procurement policies, processes and tools across the territory and ensuring that Indirect Procurement is fully aware of the challenges, opportunities, and priorities of the territory.
• Effective utilization of the e-tools to leverage value
• Provide mentorship and guidance to junior procurement team members to support their professional development.
• Advocate for ethical procurement practices and corporate social responsibility initiatives.

Qualifications

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

Critical knowledge

• Capability in developing sourcing strategies and leading the implementation.
• Good knowledge of procurement policies and procedure
• Strong background in use of procurement tools:  Ariba, e-rfx, e-procurement, SAP, and reporting analytical tools.
• Excellent knowledge of supply markets and the domain.
• Ability to handle detailed information and analyse and extract critical issues.
• Good knowledge of financial measurements, how to build a business case including ROI.
• In depth knowledge of internal purchasing policies, procedures, and processes
• Leadership of complex projects
• Cross-cultural understanding
• Good understanding of how to influence and sell internally.
• Knowledge of market intelligence methodologies to gather and analyse relevant information.
• Knowledge of analytical skills to analyse the data acquired

Critical skills

• Good  decision making, Strong negotiation and contract management skills
• Strong interpersonal, presentation and communication skill; ability to work in cross functional teams; organisation skills internally and suppliers externally
• Strong organisation, implementation, analytic and influencing skills.
• Proactive self starter who can work independently
• Strong ability to extract and analyse internal customer requirements.
• Good team leading, people development, coaching and mentoring skills

Critical experience

• Experience of working in an indirect procurement environment and for at least 7 years
• University degree (MBA, Masters)
• Strong business partnering experience and stakeholder management.
• Working in a multi-national, multi-cultural environment
• Project team leadership experience (geographically dispersed and cross-functional with proven results)
• Proven record of success in negotiations with suppliers
• Relationship management experience either internally or externally
• Strong procurement experience with demonstrated success.
• Strong business acumen
• Experience in handling complex procurement challenges and finding effective solutions.

Syngenta Competencies

Essential Syngenta dimensions

• Critical thinking
• Communicates with impact
• Focuses energy on customers/suppliers
• Influencing and negotiation

Other behaviours critical for the role

• Proactive and independent
• Sets ambitious strategic goals
• Builds a culture of innovation
• Manages for performance
• Creative yet practical in creating subcategories strategies
• Positive, not afraid of failures with strong drive to improve oneself
• Work together to deliver as One Team One Plan

Additional Information

Incumbent may, as part of his/her role and maybe through multifunctional teams, participates in the creation and design of innovative solutions. In this context, Employee may contribute to inventions, designs, other work product, including know-how, copyrights, software, innovations, solutions, and other intellectual assets.

NB: Flexible to travel within AMEA as required.