Global Category Leader

Travelport is a place of opportunity. It’s our incredible team that makes our company great – our people drive our winning culture. 

What’s Travelport?

Travelport is a worldwide travel retail platform. Our next-generation marketplace connects buyers and sellers that share our passion for delivering exceptional travel experiences. Unconflicted and independent, we are reinventing a simpler future for travel’s complex ecosystem.

What does a great Global Category Leader (GCL) do?

The GCL Develops the strategy and directs and leads the implementation of category initiatives for strategic technology partnerships and transactions in a key category primarily focused on technology; leading initiatives to optimize category spend and lower costs, and leading projects in strategic sourcing, contract negotiations, and procurement activities, providing necessary linkages and leveraging scale across the organization.

 

Specifically, they will need to work collaboratively to understand business needs, translate these needs into specific supplier requirements, and establish target pricing, terms, SLA’s, and success measures. The leader will then need to establish sourcing/negotiating strategies and drive execution and ongoing monitoring efforts to ensure objectives are realized and sustained.

 

The GCL is an integral part of the Global Sourcing team at Travelport. Global Sourcing is a highly regarded and broad reaching team whose contributions ensure Travelport’s various business and technical teams have the tools (products and services) they need to deliver industry leading solutions to our customers.

Responsibilities:

Partner with Business Units and Supplier Relationship teams

• Engage business units on their strategies and resulting needs for third party goods or services
• Lead and coach internal business partners and team members on the sourcing process. Sourcing Process includes gathering requirements, market analysis, identifying sources, proposal evaluation, negotiations, contract creation, contract management, and spend analysis.
• Maintain effective relationships with key internal customers and support organizations
• Set and achieve clear goals for cost savings, value creation and supplier performance in context of business unit operating plans
• Participate in scorecard development, quarterly business reviews, problem resolution/escalation arising from supplier performance issues for assigned commodities/services
• Work collaboratively with internal clients to assist in procurement forecasting, demand management, requirements development and identification of possible purchasing channels and sources
• Create collaborative partnerships with business stakeholders to plan and execute Procurement activities and category strategies
• Manage vendor service utilization and seek to reduce under-utilized consumption

Strategic Sourcing

• Develop and execute strategic sourcing plans for assigned commodities and services
• Use category expertise in relevant categories/commodities to establish or refine category strategy
• Conduct market analysis to develop supply market strategies
• Utilize understanding of industry, supplier dynamics and market trends to determine sources of leverage 
• Ensure optimal global spend leverage across Lines of Business (LOB’s) and geographies
• Support any new business activities within LOB’s by identifying appropriate sources within existing strategy
• Create and model Total Cost of Ownership for categories and sourcing decisions
• Drive supplier-selection processes
• Lead company-wide efforts to identify new suppliers, to include leading supplier development, and new program implementation efforts for Technology products and services
• Facilitate meetings that drive cost savings initiatives. This means demonstrating the ability to develop agendas, lead meetings, and document & publish critical results

Contract Strategy and Execution

• Lead the contract negotiation process with internal partners and suppliers. Own closure on contract.
• Lead negotiations, developing negotiation strategy and approach, fallback positions, acceptable terms and conditions through to closure. Evalua