Senior Category Manager Professional Services & Marketing and Communication

Accor Corporate

Group Procurement Organization

As Senior Category Manager, you are part of the Group Procurement Organization. Fully integrated into the Global Category Management Teams, your main responsibility are:

Marketing & Communication [M&C] Categories

• 360° marketing agencies (branding, creation, social media, events, influence, PR,…)
• E-commerce (media, metasearch, affiliation, search, emailing, retargeting…)
• Marketing services (research, print, copyrights, consulting…)
• Loyalty (partnerships, sponsoring, donations…)
• Other marketing & communication Services

Professional services [PS] Categories

• Facility management
• Human Ressources services
• Audits
• Strategic consulting
• Travel & mobility
• Translation
• Other Professional Services

Category expertises

• Ease, own, formulate and deliver the category strategy, the understanding of drivers, market forces, SWOT
• Develop and define sourcing strategy
• Develop category communities for all regions & departments
• Align category strategy with key internal & external stakeholders
• Support category knowledge to grow procurement offers and drive category expertise

• The category strategy deployment should allow significant benefits: from innovation for business, reduced risk exposure, to cost reduction
• Share category expertise with your regional procurement counterpart

Supplier management & market knowledge

• Manage the fundamentals of sourcing and supplier engagement activities including return of experience, spend pattern analysis, contract analysis, bid evaluation, negotiations, and supplier consolidation
• Manage International contracts
• Secure sustainable partnership with strategic suppliers
• Accountable for category suppliers’ management (Governance & Business Review)
• Ensure the best conditions in the market
• Ease business & market intelligence
• Develop global sourcing strategies to deliver against business objectives for internal clients, and achieve sustainable relationships with suppliers
• Prepare and hold business reviews with stakeholders to review vendor performance, future opportunities, and/or challenges
• Evaluate supplier core competencies and competitive positioning using industry cost models and benchmarking analysis

Spend & Budget

• Control category spend to capture Rate of specific categories
• Responsible for the budget achievement and for cost optimization (cost out & savings)
• Manage remuneration processes for dedicated suppliers
• Crunch data / Data analysis (spend mapping, dashboarding)
• Work with business and finance leaders to identify and drive savings and controllership improvements, focusing on total cost of ownership

Support Category Visibility (to stakeholders & procurement regional relays)

• Support and actively promote the Group Procurement Policy
• Provide guidance to internal stakeholders on procurement processes and maintain procurement ethics in accordance with Accor’s global policies
• Identify sourcing opportunities by leveraging spend analysis tools and engage with stakeholders to consolidate requirements over categories, suppliers
• Can assess risk and concisely explain complex issues to principal business owners
• Communicate, co-operate and involve relevant stakeholders to drive the overall strategy
• Engage and secure an open and direct dialogue with stakeholders
• Able to sell solutions internally, but also to external customers
• Ease & support the savings targets with managing from A to Z projects
• Stakeholder Relationship Management

Coordination of transversal projects

• Participation in sustainability initiatives to support the group sustainable targets
• Support marketing initiatives to accelerate communication strategy of the corporate procurement department such as internal newsletter, webinars, etc…
• Identify and implement solution to increase the Preferred Supplier List adoption
• Track KPIs implementation to monitor category performance & adoption
• Report & follow remuneration processes (declaration, budget, forecasts, payments, etc.)
• Initiative actions to reinforce category expertises

As Senior Category Manager you should:

• Demonstrate agility & resilience to changes
• Lead at an international level the M&C and P&S portfolio (suppliers, customers)
• Maintain and improve global performance (contract, data, savings)
• Be able to develop the relationship will all brands and customers to increase compliance
• Develop leadership with internal/external customers to satisfy their expectations by increasing business opportunities worldwide
• Position is international, and requires to deal with many stakeholders
• Manage market uncertainty
• Ability to listen & understand to customer’s needs (stakeholders & hotels) in order to drive GT portofolio
• Work in international environment
• Strong communication and negotiation skills
• Influencing skills & ease flexibility in approach between different stakeholders
• Personal integrity and strong work ethics

In addition, the candidate you have the below requested formation & experience :

• Relevant Experience: at least 5-8 years of total working experience in an international context
• A work experience in P&S and M&C Categories is required
• Proven working experience as a category manager & buyer
• Relevant work experience in negotiation & contract management
• Hospitality experience is a plus
• Required language skills: Fluent English (Daily working language), French will be a plus and any others
• A capability for networking
• Leadership capabilities
• Efficiently organized & autonomous
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Extremely customer-focused and takes the time to understand the needs of the business
• Strong analytical skills including the ability to quickly synthesize distill and draw conclusions on large amounts of disparate data
• Ability to manage multiple simultaneous projects requiring frequent communication, organization, time management, and problem-solving skills