Lead Category Manager

About the role

At MPC, we’re committed to being a great place to work – one that welcomes new ideas, encourages diverse perspectives, develops our people, and fosters a collaborative team environment. The Lead Category Manager is accountable for developing and executing strategic category plans that maximize value, optimize total cost of ownership (TCO), and mitigate risk across assigned spend categories. This role leverages data-driven insights, market intelligence, and cross-functional collaboration to deliver sustainable business results and strengthen supplier performance.

Responsibilities

• Manages assigned categories to optimize the supply base and deliver maximum value to the Business.
• Identifies and executes value delivery (cost savings, cost avoidance, revenue enhancement) and risk reduction opportunities within assigned categories.
• Analyzes and interprets data for use in decision-making and actions in support of category strategy, including TCO and should cost modeling.
• Develops, implements, and manages category strategies with focus on the value proposition, commercial agreement execution and administration.
• Develops and manages strategic partnerships with internal and external stakeholders; to include collaboration with stakeholders to align on category strategies, understand the demand/spend profile of risks and business requirements.
• Develops and manages KPIs for measuring performance for key suppliers.
• Facilitates issue resolution related to supplier performance.
• Leads utilization and performance assessments to confirm strategies are effective and strategic suppliers are meeting and exceeding expectations.
• Identifies and leads strategic sourcing projects within assigned categories, analyzes business objectives, develops project plan and charter, leads and/or facilitates cross-functional teams to ensure milestones are met, tracks project progress and monitors performance against plan, facilitates meetings, prepares reports and presentations to communicate status.
• Collaborates with stakeholders to understand the demand/spend profile of assigned category and sub-categories.
• Responsible for the strategy development to mitigate risks and to ensure best-in-class support for ongoing business requirements.
• Mentors category analyst to ensure all aspects of the category strategy are being executed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• Six (6) or more years of Supply Chain or business-relevant experience.