Category Manager - Food Service

Req ID: 458187 

BASIC PURPOSE: The Category Manager has an overall responsibility to drive commercial value and enhance Love’s competitive position through end-to-end category management activities within the assigned categories.  This position will partner with stakeholder teams across the organization to manage supplier relationships, negotiate pricing and contracts, and develop and execute category sourcing strategies focused on minimizing total cost of ownership and maximizing service quality.

MAJOR RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Enables Love’s to efficiently and effectively maximize the value they receive from suppliers
  • Ensures all legal documents are in place for each supplier, including NDA, Master Supplier Agreements, and Product Agreements
  • Leads and conducts the RFP process, bid analysis and review, contract negotiations, and blanket purchase agreement creation
• Identify and realize cost-savings and cost-reduction opportunities
  • Use spend analysis to develop ideas for cost savings initiatives within assigned categories
  • Evaluate potential cost improvement opportunities, document with business case and champion change in support of department/company initiatives
• Minimizes risk of supply disruption
  • Identifies supply and supplier issues. Analyzes market intelligence to assess root cause, improvement opportunities, and associated risk
  • Develops solutions and gains consensus to resolve supply issues
• Builds strategic relationships
  • Builds relationships with supplier contacts and identifies candidate suppliers to be considered for strategic relationships
  • Builds and maintains collaborative relationships with Food Service team members and leadership to collectively identify business drivers, process improvements, and value creation opportunities
  • Understand company’s goals and build supplier relationships as needed to support those goals
• Monitors purchasing performance
  • Monitors supplier quality and supplier performance and completes supplier scorecards

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

• Education:
  • Bachelor’s Degree in supply chain management or a business-related field preferred.
• Experience:
  • 5-8 years of Supply Chain, Finance, or Operations work experience
  • Understanding of category management and procurement strategies
  • Understand and function effectively in a team environment
  • Experience working with Food Service categories
  • Effective, proven negotiation skills
  • Excellent written and oral communication skills
  • Enhanced understanding of data driven spend analytics and data visualization (Excel, Power BI, or similar)
  • Experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Procure-to-Pay systems

SKILLS AND PHYSICAL DEMANDS:

• Skills:
  • Hard skills: Intermediate proficiency with Microsoft Office suite required, experience with large scale accounting systems strongly preferred.
  • Soft Skills: Ability to learn new software applications and computer programs; ability to type efficiently and accurately; comfortable handling multiple interruptions and adjusting priorities throughout the workday while meeting deadlines; ability to communicate effectively (both orally and in writing) with diverse individuals and to consistently handle interpersonal situations in a professional and respectful manner; and excellent memory and organizational abilities.
• Typical Physical Demands:
  • Requires prolonged sitting, some bending and stooping
  • Manual dexterity sufficient to operate a computer keyboard and calculator
  • Requires normal range of hearing and vision
  • Possible evening/weekend work

Job Function(s): Corporate 

Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores is the industry-leading travel stop network in the United States. For more than 55 years, we’ve provided customers with highway hospitality and “Clean Places, Friendly Faces.” We’re passionate about serving drivers with clean, modern facilities stocked with fuel, food and supplies. We offer meals from popular restaurant chains, trucking supplies, showers and everything needed to get back on the road quickly. The Love’s Family of Companies includes:

• Gemini Motor Transport, one of the industry’s safest trucking fleets
• Speedco, the light mechanical and trucking service specialists
• Musket, a rapidly growing, Houston-based commodities supplier and trader
• Trillium, a Houston-based alternative fuels expert