Category Manager, Pharma

The Senior Global Category Manager of EMEA Strategic Procurement is responsible for leading and executing strategic and innovative procurement activities across all assigned categories in EMEA. This role oversees contract negotiations for the procurement of supplies and services for EMEA FMC spend, ensuring optimal terms and conditions. The position requires strong collaboration with other FMC divisions and colleagues to develop fully integrated global sourcing programs. The ideal candidate for this role possesses the ability to build strong relationships with suppliers and internal stakeholders and ensure that category strategies cross-functionally are aligned. This role will help shape the global pharmaceutical framework of Fresenius Medical Care, owning strategy, analytics, and communications for executive-level projects related to brand and generic molecules in the EMEA region as well as collaborating on various global projects.

Global Category Management

• Champions the global structure of EMEA category management processes to develop category strategies including diversity, sustainability, risk assessment, currency, and overall continuity, in alignment with business KPIs and other global category managers.
• Provides thought leadership in implementing sourcing strategies in collaboration with the medical office, business stakeholders and procurement operations to support, implement and govern initiatives.
• Manages global supplier relationships and products, decreases cost, maximizes reimbursement, leverages scale, and establishes global SOPs for transfer of knowledge.
• Owns responsibility for supplier qualification, supplier selection, contract development with legal, implementation, compliance, ongoing supply base management process, and RFPs as appropriate utilizing Jaggaer.
• Leverages proven methods to develop and drive 3-to-5-year regional/global sourcing strategies focused on identifying and contracting with suppliers that meet category management and business partner goals.
• Assesses market intelligence for key trends, and leverages predictive analytics to make recommendations to the regional/global business.
• Participates in supplier business reviews, established pharmaceutical industry exhibitions and conferences.
• Removes roadblocks and organizational silos to support global information sharing and insights.

Procurement Partnering

• Proactively engages Global Business Partners and functional stakeholders to gather business requirements for category strategy development.
• Creates and maintains a communication mechanism to ensure coordination with internal stakeholders and reporting of sourcing impact.
• Drives adoption of global sourcing strategies across the enterprise and ensures ongoing cross team collaboration.
• Effectively collaborates with internal Global Pharma Category team and Procurement Value Enablement to create shared expertise across categories for all areas of spend; APIs, Biologics, Injectables and OTC/Other.
• Mentors and develops junior staff through coaching and activity inclusion to create pharma specific expertise.

Scale of Responsibilities

• Demonstrates a measurable reduction in year over year total cost of ownership for the goods and services being sourced without compromising quality and service levels and ensuring continuity of supply by proactively managing potential market disruptions through market insight and supplier relationships.
• Acts as the key category interface with all levels within FKC divisions ensuring alignment of strategies and financial targets.
• Accountable for the multi-year category strategy and plan objectives, timelines, and goals.
• Works with enterprise expertise to analyze cross-divisional spending and develops regional/global strategic sourcing plans to reduce the total cost of ownership for all business units.
• Champions use of eSourcing, Spend Visibility, AI integration, Learning platforms and R2P tools company-wide.
• Closely partners with Procurement Supply Chain and Operations to activate and leverage insights from financial planning, forecasting, P&L performance, inventory, cash flow, tariffs, and inflation to continuously inform category strategy.

• Achieve defined goals for quality of procurement performance through metrics and feedback from constituent customer groups.
• Maintain, promote, and distribute key performance indicators to ensure continuous improvement.
• Champion a culture of continuous improvement within the Procurement department.
• Collaborate effectively with PVE to ensure the execution and integration of global and regional strategies.

• Ownership of all Pharma-related meetings and leadership presentations, representing the team successfully.
• Establish and maintain strong relationships with key suppliers and stakeholders, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
• Own the process of adding, updating and securing all savings for category in Wave and/or other identified tracking systems.
• Manages toward procurement KPI’s such as spend under contract, payments terms, etc. KPI’s to be regularly updated.
• Actively manage and execute new and existing contracts, conducting thorough reviews to guarantee contracts are robust and align with organizational standards and objectives.

• BS/BA Degree required, Life Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry or Pharmaceuticals preferred.
• MBA preferred.
• Advanced negotiations skills courses, a plus.

• Minimum 10 years of progressive procurement experience, with at least 5 years of pharmaceutical or healthcare materials procurement. Global healthcare experience, a plus.
• Strong leadership and business partnering skills with the ability to influence without authority.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills including compiling and presenting insights/recommendations to leadership.
• Excellent analytical ability, including interpreting data and developing recommendations based on analysis.
• Requires the ability to deal with ambiguity and the capacity to make succinct recommendations based on available information.
• Excellent planning ability, including identification of critical success factors, key obstacles, and risks.
• Thorough understanding of benchmarking, process mapping, process redesign, and other cost saving tools.
• Focus on key outcomes, not only processes or activities.
• Demonstrated ability to identify and balance interests of a variety of key stakeholders.
• Identify and confront issues and problems directly and promptly.
• Provide quick and decisive recommendations based on systematic analysis.
• Strong negotiation, communication and relationship building skills.