Sr Buyer and Category Specialist

Ashland Inc.

Are you the kind of person that is always thinking, sketching, seeking, and adjusting? Who needs to understand how things work and then figure out how they can work better? Are you a passionate, tenacious, solver who loves to work with others who share your drive? Are you positive, constructive, and ingenious? Are you always solving? Then we’d like to meet you and bet you’d like to meet us.

Ashland has an exciting opportunity for a Category Specialist / Sr. Buyer for Indirect MRO / CAPEX / Site Services to join our Global Procurement team in Hopewell, Virginia. The candidate will be required to work three days at the plant site in Hopewell, VA. This is a very visible, significant role within the Company and the Procurement function. This position will report to Associate Director, Indirect Global Procurement.

The responsibilities of the position include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Develop Category Strategy plans following 7 step strategic sourcing methodology and use appropriate support tools to drive results and deliver savings.
• Ensuring all procurement services are met for the assigned Ashland plants, labs, and / or facilities.
• Negotiate, implement, and manage strategic contracts to ensure optimum cost and reliable supply.
• Identify opportunities for cost savings, better efficiency, and other areas of improvement; recommend and/or implement policy or process changes, as appropriate.
• Develop and deploy supply risk assessment and mitigation programs to ensure business continuity.
• Manage operational issues related to supply challenges.
• Facilitating RFP / RFQ / RFI and preparing Coupa sourcing / bidding events according to engineering specifications and / or business requirements.
• Conducting bid analysis with a cross functional team and awarding based on internal team consensus.
• Be an active member of MRO / Site Services Team and actively collaborate with other team members to deliver on procurement/corporate objective.
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key suppliers driving optimized value through strategic relationship management program.
• Extracting and analyzing spend data by various criteria from various ERP/S2P reporting tools (Coupa, SAP, QlikView).
• Representing as Corporate Agent: Ensuring Regulatory Compliance and Corporate Policies are enforced.
• Ensuring strict compliance to Ashland’s Zero Incident Culture and Responsible Care Guidelines.
• Travel – Limited. Up to 25% to visit Ashland sites, supplier visits, internal meetings, and industry conferences.

To be qualified for this role, you must possess the following:

• Minimum of 5-10 years of strategic MRO / CAPEX / Site Services procurement and/or related experience required.
• Minimum Education: bachelor’s degree preferably in engineering or supply chain discipline; MBA and / or CPSM Certification a plus
• Directly managing complex multi category spend greater than $50MM.
• Experience in Chemical or Pharmaceutical industry and/or in Fortune 500 companies a plus
• Demonstrated knowledge of category management and use of 7SSS (Step Strategic Sourcing) methodology
• Demonstrated knowledge of applying TCO (total cost of ownership) and other methodologies in evaluating suppliers’ proposals
• Strong knowledge of deploying and leveraging Supplier Relationship Management program in a global supply base
• Demonstrated expertise in deploying supply Risk Assessment and Mitigation program in diverse categories of materials.
• Demonstrated knowledge of Contracting practices and processes in a global environment
• Strong communication, follow-up, presentation, and teamwork skills to be performed with a sense of urgency as required.
• Good knowledge of Coupa and other tools such as SAP and Ariba.

The following skill sets are preferred:

• Five plus years’ experience – dealing with senior management and managing complex small value spend as well as multi-millions $ high value spend/contracts.
• Demonstrated experience working in diverse global cross-functional teams in highly matrixed environment.

In more than 100 countries, the people of Ashland LLC. (NYSE: ASH) provide the specialty chemicals, technologies and insights to help customers create new and improved products for today and sustainable solutions for tomorrow. Our chemistry is at work every day in a wide variety of market