Senior Director - Supplier Relations

As a Senior Director - Supplier Relations, you will partner with the sales and sales support teams, and be responsible for providing strategic and tactical leadership to manage the relationship with key/strategic suppliers for a specific business unit. You will develop strategic relationship management plans that include field sales engagement, sales enablement, supplier volume rebates, and high-level negotiations. You will monitor monthly and quarterly performance and compliance with Wesco’s standards while driving continuous improvement and resolving performance issues.

Responsibilities:

Strategic Development

• Balance strategic goals, operational performance and cost mitigation through network optimization by building annual business plans for strategic suppliers.
• Identify business needs through analyzing metrics and providing overviews of industry landscape and maintaining awareness of current market trends and conditions that may affect vendors and pricing and may have an operational or strategic impact on the company.
• Create plans to address competitive gaps.
• Selects, manages, evaluates, and develops staff.

Vendor Relationship Development and Management

• Drive down unit cost of network through development and implementation of a vendor strategy while maintaining operational performance.
• Ability to improve end-to-end supplier performance through increasing capacity, improving supplier supply chain responsiveness, and raising performance standards, whilst maintaining high levels of quality.
• Partner with sales to building sales programs in each region which will ultimately lead to reciprocal sales from our large vendors.
• Managing relationships with vendors to ensure WESCO has the right connections into key vendors at all levels and functions from day-to-day ordering to escalation and strategic negotiation.

Risk Management and Process Improvement

• Evaluate, renegotiate, and approve vendor MSAs to meet current market standards for key terms such SVRs, payment terms, cash discounts, and marketing cooperative advertising.
• Monitor day-to-day vendor risk management processes and procedures to ensure consistency with corporate policy while resolving disputes and minimizing corporate exposure.
• Act upon gathered performance data and provide quarterly feedback to business partners to identify key activities and priorities nationally and globally.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• 15 years required of management in electrical distribution industry.
• 15 years required of progressive management in varied organizational development projects and programs.
• 10-15 years of experience, building the following skills:
• Demonstrable negotiation skills in standard as well as complex environments/situations.
• Successful track record showing ability to work with a team to set strategic direction aligned with business goals with a clear execution plan and activity.
• Business and management principles related to strategic planning and resource allocation.
• Knowledge of industry including suppliers, customers, and competitors.
• Strong communication, analytical, negotiation skills.
• Strong strategic thinking skills.
• Ability to identify and cultivate external resources preferred.
• Ability to develop and manage vendor relationships and service providers preferred.
• Ability to work with senior management, as well as regional and group operational teams preferred.
• Ability to find and grow employees capable of moving up a minimum of two levels preferred.

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