Director, Materials APAC (Soft Good Experience）

Position Overview: 

Build direct relationships with material vendors to create a Preferred Vendor List (PSL) that leverages overall spending, improved quality, delivery, and compliance to strategic goals. Develop partnerships with source factories to improve operational performance on raw material purchases. Supports material development schedules. Strong relationship with product creation to enable and drive vendor innovation, identifying new vendor needs and timely onboarding to support new product development. Leads Kanban, pull processing, Lean, and vendor guidelines with materials vendors.

Key Responsibilities 

• Establishes a process to measure and report global demand for materials and components to meet the Brands’ finished product needs, including demands coming from contract factories.
• Develops understanding of global vendor base to ensure growth plans can be reasonably met.
• Participates in internal development, sourcing and costing teams to negotiate costs on materials and components.
• Deploy a Preferred Supplier List (PSL) strategy for all commodities including vendor guidelines and ensure that all factory specifications conform to the PSL.
• Lead material spend-analytics and commodity indexing process to help develop an overall material sourcing strategy that supports new product introduction, supplier consolidation, process standardization, material cost reduction, transaction cost removal, and process digitization that meets the strategic plan goals.
• Drive average 3-5% productivity targets on cost reduction utilizing different strategies and in partnership with vendor partners.
• Deploy dual-source and localization strategies to drive spend with preferred suppliers and in the local country of manufacture.
• Develops a global vendor certification process in partnership with quality.
• Works with Development, and Sourcing to implement processes to maintain a current vendor and materials database, approve new vendors, and terminate non-conforming vendors.
• Develops a Vendor Report Card system to monitor vendor performance, and to create an ongoing communication regarding improvement needs.
• Leads efforts to implement Kanban, “pull” systems, and reduced lead-time programs between vendors and contract manufacturers.
• Supports continuous quality improvement methodologies between vendors and contract manufacturers.
• Identifies new vendor sources in support of development and production needs.
• Partners with relevant internal groups to ensure vendors meet corporate social responsibility requirements, and materials and components meet all environmental and physical testing standards.

Skills and Experience: 

• Experience leading materials and/or procurement organizations in CPG and FMCG type organization
• Experience building supplier management portals for collaboration and tracking
• Computer skills include Microsoft Office (WORD, EXCEL, etc.).
• Excellent negotiation and project management skills required.
• Excellent written and verbal communications skills required (minimum English/Mandarin)
• Domestic & International travel required
• Must be a strong team player and have the ability to make and strengthen partnerships both internally and externally.
• Must be able to function independently, and able to complete goals and milestones to move the business forward.

Education and Requirements: 

• Bachelor’s degree required. Advanced degree a plus.
• Minimum of 10 years’ experience in Materials Management and/or Purchasing