Manager, Procurement - Packaging

Overview

 

At Eagle Foods we are builders.  We are builders of brands, categories, and people.  Eagle Foods enjoys a rich heritage with brands that have proven category leadership for more than 150 years.  Eagle is a diversified food company producing and marketing sweetened condensed and evaporated milk, snacks and convenient meal solutions products.  As a company, Eagle Foods is passionate about fostering an entrepreneurial spirit that boldly builds better people and better brands while focusing on the positive impact our company, our products and our people have on the world.  Eagle Foods has a bold family of brands that consumers have come to rely on for decades, including Eagle Brand® Sweetened Condensed Milk and Evaporated Milk, Magnolia® Sweetened Condensed Milk, PET® Milk, Popcorn Indiana, Cretors Popcorn, Helper and Suddenly Salad.  Eagle Foods products are marketed and distributed across all U.S. retail channels, including grocery stores, club stores and mass-merchandisers, as well as foodservice and export, U.S. military, and private label business.

Responsibilities

• Developing sourcing strategies for the goods you have been assigned to buy (packaging and film)
• Identifying potential suppliers, contract manufacturers, and co-packers, assessing their capabilities and capacity, and issuing RFI’s and RFP’s to support competitive bidding processes
• Developing and maintaining a database of all potential contract manufacturers and co-packers in current product categories and key focus/development areas for Eagle Foods, including understanding capabilities and capacity availability.
• Preparing and presenting to the ELT category market updates and proposing strategies to mitigate risks or capitalize on current market conditions.
• Market Watch Report preparation and publication.
• Assessing trial material requirements and coordinating material orders in addition to communicating timelines and updates with cross functional team.
• Generating and distributing 52 week packaging and film forecasts with weekly and monthly summaries for all Meals & Sides suppliers.
• Updating the procurement slides for the Supply Chain Results Review.
• Supporting leadership data requests and summaries pertaining to spend history, volumes, sourcing strategy, etc., by retrieving and summarizing data into a meaningful format. 
• Executing supply agreements that secure capacity and meet quality, cost, service, liability and risk, supply assurance and entering contract agreements in PPS100 to ensure PO pricing and volumes align with contract terms. 
• Updating the budget file for new fiscal year
• Managing cost to budget/PPV throughout the year
• Acting as bridge between the Eagle supply planning teams and suppliers as those teams work to identify:
  • Required ordering/release lead times
  • Optimal inventory strategies/safety stocks to ensure no production disruptions inclusive of leveraging the ability of a supplier to hold inventory
  • Optimal order quantities to deliver best total value thru the lens of cost tiering but also obsolescence risk (aka Economic Order Quantities)
• Constantly seeking cost savings opportunities and presenting them to the business for consideration (supplier changes, material changes, down weighting/gauging, etc.)
• Supporting innovation and change management needs by working upstream with marketing and R&D, sitting on innovation teams, and partnering with suppliers to identify affordable material solutions that will bring R&D and marketing concepts to life reliably and affordably
• Acting as project manager over the multi-functional project team responsible for the integration and start-up of contract manufacturers and co-packers. Upon start-up and integration completion, transfer primary transactional ownership to the planning and scheduling teams.
• Attending weekly/biweekly coman project management meetings with cross-functional Eagle Foods team to manage innovation projects and trials.
• Establishing and participating in regular cadence KPI reviews with suppliers, contract manufacturers and co-packers to ensure contractual obligations and continuously evaluating supplier performance for regulatory compliance, product quality, and supply continuity.
• Coordinating change management activities with the supply planning teams, plants and suppliers to ensure changes are delivered on time, at cost, with no service disruptions and minimal obsolescence
• Providing second level support to the plants on material quality or service issues via our dispute resolution/escalation protocol
• Overseeing the setting up of suppliers in M3
• Supporting accounts payable in resolving invoicing issues
• Staying connected with industry trends by identifying and participating in a limited number of industry groups/associations
• Setting up mechanisms to stay connected to market trends
• Special projects as needed

Qualifications

• 5+ years of procurement experience
• Experience in both tactical buying but also strategic sourcing and supplier relationship management
• Experience leveraging supplier capabilities to support innovation
• Experience managing commodities and a hedge program a plus
• Experience building an annual budget and managing cost vs. budget
• Proficient in Microsoft Office, specifically strong in Excel.
  • Consumer products experience preferred.

 

Education:          

•  Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering or supply chain/logistics preferred.

 

Critical Skills & Attributes

and Other Requirements:

• Travel: must be able travel to visit plants and suppliers as needed, typically short trips, with a max of 1-2 trips per month
• Sourcing and negotiation skills
• Communication and PPT presentation skills
• Business acumen
• Project management skills
• Dispute resolution skills – an ability to get in the middle of a situation and leverage facts and data vs emotions to come to a reasonable outcome
• Data and Analytics – experience personally building dashboards to regularly assess operational performance and identify loss recovery opportunities. Strong desire to manage through metrics and data.
• Innovative – an out of the box thinker who strives for excellence.
• Act with Intensity – must be urgent and positively engage others, be visible and confident.
• Driving results through others – able to lead and influence others that do not directly report to you to positive outcomes for the business
• Continuous Improvement – never satisfied with the status quo;always seeking to identify and drive further opportunity for improvement.