Regional Category Manager

**Your Job**
You're not the person who will settle for just any role. Neither are we. Because we're out to create Better Care for a Better World, and that takes a certain kind of person and teams who care about making a difference. Here, you'll bring your professional expertise, talent, and drive to building and managing our portfolio of iconic, ground-breaking brands. In your role, you'll help us deliver better care for billions of people around the world. It starts with YOU.
**About Us**
Huggies. Kleenex. Cottonelle. Scott. Kotex. Poise. Depend. Kimberly-Clark Professional. You already know our legendary brands—and so does the rest of the world. In fact, millions of people use Kimberly-Clark products every day. We know these amazing Kimberly-Clark products wouldn't exist without talented professionals, like you.
At Kimberly-Clark, you'll be part of the best team committed to driving innovation, growth and impact. We're founded on 150 years of market leadership, and we're always looking for new and better ways to perform - so there's your open door of opportunity. It's all here for you at Kimberly-Clark; you just need to log on
Led by Purpose. Driven by You.
**About You**
You're driven to perform at the highest level possible, and you appreciate a performance culture fueled by authentic caring. You want to be part of a company actively dedicated to sustainability, inclusion, wellbeing, and career development.
You love what you do, especially when the work you do makes a difference. At Kimberly-Clark, we're constantly exploring new ideas on how, when, and where we can best achieve results. When you join our team, you'll experience Flex That Works: flexible (hybrid) work arrangements that empower you to have purposeful time in the office and partner with your leader to make flexibility work for both you and the business.
An opportunity has opened up to change the way we operate in Strategic Procurement and help to deliver the competitive advantage K-C needs to win in the marketplace.
Category Manager (CM) manages the sourcing of all Fasteners, Elastics and Peel Strip (FEPS) requirements in the region. These are major value purchase areas with significant implications in company profitability and service efficiency. The CM must influence senior country leaders and deliver category strategy through strong supplier collaboration, commercial awareness, and strategic thinking. This is typically delivered by working closely with regional procurement, R&E professionals, mills, and key cross functional stakeholders.
In this role the CM supports the development of global category strategies and provides LAO expertise to define, develop, influence, and deploy the regional category strategy for the LAO businesses. The CM will work closely with the global category directors, regional stakeholders and suppliers to execute consistent category strategies that deliver clear business benefits and impact in quality, service and total cost of supply metrics.
**Main responsibilities**:
- Build a broad understanding of category with detailed understanding of purchase spend, purchase portfolio and supplier performance.
- Create and maintain category management knowledge and processes to ensure the category strategies are informed, relevant and up to date.
- Monitor supplier performance indicators and initiate supplier reviews as required or in accordance with agreed programs to drive improvement and reduce risk across the enterprise.
- Connect and influence stakeholder network
- Identify, build and maintain an effective cross functional stakeholder network.
- Understand business and functional requirements.
- Support and align with Global Category management to proactively influence internal stakeholders.
- Lead interactions with procurement organization and other stakeholders
- Gain necessary input and cross functional expertise whilst influencing acceptance, agreement, and support from key stakeholders to ensure ultimate compliance and support.
- Manage supplier contracts, develop relationship management strategies driving collaboration, supplier relationship management and / or other engagement programs
- In conjunction with the Global Category Directors recommendation, agree and lead relationship programs.
- Build trust and credibility with suppliers by demonstrating integrity, commitment, and results orientation to drive and deliver results.
- Maintain an effective business relationship with all suppliers and stakeholders based on clear, concise group and personal communication.
- Drive improvement programs and transformations to support category management strategy
- Through the regional and global stakeholder network, become the regional point of contact, focal point and connector for strategic category management projects and initiatives for FEPS.
- Create, maintain and drive a regional program of quantified NMP (New Material Price) and VFE (Value for Exploration)

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