Senior Director, Gross Margin Improvement

Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare, with leading businesses and products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutritionals and branded generic medicines. Our 114,000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.

     

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Job Title

Sr Director Gross Margin Improvement

About Abbott

Abbott is a global healthcare leader, creating breakthrough science to improve people’s health. We’re always looking towards the future, anticipating changes in medical science and technology.

Working at Abbott

At Abbott, you can do work that matters, grow, and learn, care for yourself and family, be your true self and live a full life. You’ll also have access to:

• Career development with an international company where you can grow the career you dream of.
• Free medical coverage for employees* via the Health Investment Plan (HIP) PPO
• An excellent retirement savings plan with high employer contribution
• Tuition reimbursement, the Freedom 2 Save student debt program and FreeU education benefit - an affordable and convenient path to getting a bachelor’s degree.
• A company recognized as a great place to work in dozens of countries around the world and named one of the most admired companies in the world by Fortune.
• A company that is recognized as one of the best big companies to work for as well as a best place to work for diversity, working mothers, female executives, and scientists.

The Opportunity

Based in Plymouth, MN, the Senior Director of Margin Improvement will own the Margin Improvement program for Electrophysiology. The incumbent will identify and implement high impact/large scale initiatives to deliver sustainable improvement to gross margin.  S/he will collaborate across cross-functional division leadership to gain broad alignment for the long-term strategy, as well as short-term execution of critical projects and programs.  This position will report to the Division Vice President, Operations.   

What You’ll Work On

• Develops roadmap to achieve EP gross margin profile and gains alignment with the EP senior leadership team and other key stakeholders. Defines roadmap milestones and tracks and reports progress against those milestones.
• Establishes proactive, transparent, and effective communications cadence to ensure timely dissemination of information with the senior leadership team and other stakeholders.
• Performs benchmarking and cost structure analysis to identify significant opportunities for improvement across functions.
• Partners with the leadership team to define and assign goals, develop project funnels, support execution, and manage/mitigate risks.
• Builds cross-functional network of GMI champions across all areas of the EP division to ideate, evaluate, and implement specific projects and actions to achieve GMI goals.
• Ensures high impact programs are defined, resourced, and implemented in order to achieve financial objectives, as defined in the long-term strategy. Ensures effective change management plans are defined to identify and mitigate risk and ensure sustainability of the changes.
• Develops and deploys sustaining tools and processes to support the evaluation and identification of opportunities across direct and indirect spend areas.

Required Qualifications

• Minimum 10 years’ experience managing large programs and cross-functional teams across multiple international locations.

• Familiarity and experience working across functions (e.g., Operations/Supply Chain, Regulatory, Quality, R&D, Finance, Commercial, HR, et. al.); natural tendency to think about key questions/issues from an integrated, cross-functional perspective.
• Track record of synthesizing diverse perspectives into cohesive, aligned recommendations; ability to develop an inclusive culture comfortable with challenging current paradigms to achieve and exceed goals.
• Demonstrated skill at influencing outcomes by catalyzing and shaping dialogue across the organization. Assertiveness and resiliency to appropriately engage and challenge peers and business leaders on key strategies to make decisions in the best interests of Abbott.
• Exceptional project management skills, with proven ability to clearly define objectives and priorities, establish milestones, anticipate and mitigate risks, lead cross-functional team