Job Description

Job Title

Europe Procurement Category Specialist

Closing date: 24th April

About Us

With over 200 brands sold in nearly 180 countries, we’re the world’s leading premium drinks company. Bring your passion and use your curiosity as you explore, collaborate, and innovate to build brands consumers love. Together with passionate people from all over the world, you’ll test new ideas, learn and grow, and unlock a brighter, more exciting future. Join us to create a career worth celebrating.

About The Function

Our Procurement team are innovators, always seeking new ways to help our business, people and much-loved brands thrive. We’re dedicated to maximising the £12 billion+ we spend every year, building brands of premium quality, while creating sustainable value and growth. Together, we’re shaping the services, partnerships and innovations that meet our future needs.

Our procurement team delivers outstanding end-to-end value across our supply chain and offers innovative supplier solutions. Together, we’re driving our 'Society 2030: Spirit of Progress' plan across suppliers and agency partners to create a more sustainable world. Wherever you choose to carve your career, we’ll support and encourage you in our inclusive culture.

About The Role

The Procurement Market role is accountable for active participation in a global community of procurement professionals in one or more spend categories, including joining regular meetings, supporting alignment around strategy, supporting development of own and others’ capabilities & expertise and sharing of best practices.

As Category Lead in Europe you will join the fantastic Europe Marketing Procurement team. Scope of Europe region includes the Market clusters of GB, Ireland, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and MENA (Middle East North Africa).

Role Responsibilities

• Building Category Plans: Applying strategic procurement excellence, through feeding into the Global Category Strategy and creation of the Europe Category Strategy/Implementation plan. Your plans should consider market insights, deliver excellence benefits, and drive value in line with targets.
• Strategic Execution: Supporting end-to-end execution of category strategies, working with global and other market category professionals in line with strategy.
• Business Partnering: Cultivate and nurture key stakeholder connections internally and externally to help shape investment decisions, drive commercial advantage, minimize risk, and ensure quality of delivery and performance.
• Agency Ecosystem Management: Drive development and optimization of the agency ecosystem for business and brand needs.
• Sourcing Excellence: Spearhead sourcing activities including negotiating with agency partners, implementing workplans, navigating agency selection processes, and contracting.
• Relationship Collaboration Programme (RCP) Leadership: Drive RCP initiatives across relevant areas.
• Driving the Highest Standards of Compliance: Through risk management processes, spend monitoring, segmentation, savings tracking & reporting, contract management, cost modelling/benchmarking.
• Data-Led Decision Making: Utilize key tools and data to generate insights that enable you to objectively challenge established practices to stimulate alternative thinking and influence decision-making.
• Subject Expertise: Develop deep expertise in specific spend categories.
  
  

In addition to category deliver the Specialist will play a key role with the rest of the team to drive us against the wider Procurement Ambition and vision.

Experience / Skills Required

We are looking for a dynamic individual with the ability to thrive in an agile and fast-paced environment while finding clarity in ambiguous situations by stimulating alternative thinking. We want you to show high levels of energy and commitment and a relentlessness in the pursuit of goals.

• Experience in a Procurement, Finance, Project Management, Marketing, Commercial or other relevant role. If you have experience in a sector similar to ours then that would be a bonus.
• You have strong analytical skills, including forensic understanding of the cost drivers to target and influence costs through end-to-end value. Have commercial acumen, understanding of the business and judgment.
• You can demonstrate consistent performance and examples of executing projects and driving strategic change through influencing stakeholders. You use industry knowledge and research to drive improvements.
• Strong communication skills are a key strength and you have the ability to articulate across all levels of the organization. Experience developing and carrying out category and procurement strategies is advantageous.
• Independent thinker with strong leadership & communication skills, able to inspire internal marketing team members and external agency partners.
• Experience in high-spend negotiations in a Procurement function would be advantageous, however if you are familiar with negotiations on a business or at Marketing level this is encouraging too.
  
  

Working with Us

Flexibility is key to success in our business and many of our people work flexibly in many different ways, including part-time, compressed hours, flexible location. Please talk to us about what flexibility means to you and don’t let anything stop you from applying.

We offer a highly competitive rewards and benefits package including:

• Contemporary work life balance policies and wellbeing activities
• Contributary pension scheme
• Comprehensive health benefits
• Annual bonus
  
  

Our purpose is to celebrate life, every day, everywhere. And creating an inclusive culture, where everyone feels valued and listened to, is a crucial part of this.

We believe the most diverse and inclusive culture makes for a better business and a better world.

We know that for our business to thrive and for Diageo to realise its ambition, we depend on having diverse talent with a range of backgrounds, skills and capabilities in each of the countries in which we operate and to reflect our broad consumer base.

Around the world we have a number of inclusive Business and Employee Resource Groups known as BRGs and ERGs. These influential groups, made up of our people, represent various viewpoints, experiences and communities who generate thought-provoking work to enhance our business and workplace, creating a sense of belonging and opportunities for all.

Join us, and you'll be part of an organisation that embraces diversity in the broadest possible sense. This means that you'll be welcomed and celebrated for who you are just by being you. You'll be part of — and help build — an inclusive culture that celebrates people of different gender, ethnicity, ability, age, sexual orientation, social class, educational backgrounds, experiences, approaches and more. And you'll help us champion inclusion and diversity across our entire business: with our employees, our suppliers, across our brands, and within the communities in which we operate.

Worker Type

Regular

Primary Location:

1HQ

Additional Locations :

Edinburgh Park, Hamburg, Madrid

Job Posting Start Date

2025-04-17