Regional Source to Pay (S2P) Market Operations Manager at Unilever

Purpose of role:

• The Source to Pay (S2P) Market Operations role plays an integral part of the Commercial Experience (ComEx) organisation – at the heartbeat of Unilever, having a future fit operation, focus on Resilience, Fuel for Growth, and managing Future growth within our evolving organisation.
• Globally we manage over 60k vendors across more than 82 markets supporting our key business groups – Beauty & Wellbeing, Personal Care, Homecare, Nutrition, and Ice cream, through the UniOps organisation.
• Our Markets S2P role enables deployment of experience solutions and key transformation programmes and are the glue between Procurement and Suppliers helping execute sourcing activities for indirect items such as MBS, Capex, MRO and Logistics.
• We ensure the steps required to have a purchase requisition raised and a purchase order created are completed and capture the relevant information at each stage of the process; we also play an important role ensuring suppliers are compliant with all of the relevant Unilever policies and wider business regulations.​​​​​​​ To do this we liaise with Markets and Portfolios to facilitate transactions and progressively ensure we drive value to the business, either through cash saving or preventing price leakages.
• We interface with both supplier and strategic run partners to optimize processes and drive better sourcing practices to benefit all parties. Those who work with us benefit from our strong focus on the user experience, and their mature risk and control processes.

Role responsibilities

• The Source to Pay regional role will be responsible for the complete management with forward thinking solutions improving end user experiences.
• As part of this delivery, the role encompasses the delivery of the S2P Finance Processes with the objective of exceeding best in class metrics end to end S2P process for selected countries, mainly through third-party outsourced providers (IBM, Accenture, AMEX, Citi, etc).
• The S2P manager has sole responsibility over full delivery of the Global Unilever Process Model for specific countries within the UniOps P2P transformation scope.
• The person working in this role will be the critical link between MCO being service recipient and 3PSP where the Services are performed. S/He will act as P2P process owner for his/her region and will be accountable for 3PSP service and delivery in front of MCOs in scope .

The S2P service line is responsible for:

• Accounts Payable processes (AP)
• Contract to Pay finance process supporting Procurement networks including
  Indirect (MBS) and Direct Procurement (Packaging, Chemicals, CM, Logistics), Travel and employee expense processes including credit cards.
• Global Process Models encompassing S2P
• Accountability and efficiency of TPSPs supporting Unilever MCOs being service recipient and TPSP where the finance S2P role acts as process owners for his/her region.
• Delivery of the Uniops S2P Transformation scope, leveraging digitisation and analytical technology to improve reporting analytics.
• Drive transformation and savings projects, relevant to further streamline operations
• Service: Ensure the IHD (supplier help desk) improves service end users experience as well as suppliers, increasing user end perception, supporting business critical escalations, and ensuring fast resolutions are provided.
• Collaboration, facilitate user training to improve awareness of contracting and finance functions to drive down finance related queries.  Having an extensive knowledge of procurement networks and systems such as Coupa, ICAT, SAP would be a good advantage to support the role, to drive resolutions faster resulting in enhanced ways of working supporting procurement, planning, suppliers, AP and FC functions.
• Drive resilience and compliance
• Drive capabilities and transformation
• Develop Talent and capability within the S2P team

Accountability (Deliverable Outputs):

• Overall management and control (through KPIs/SLAs/OLAs plus internal, external and ZBC audit requirements) of P2P processes in dedicated countries
• Leveraging cost-effective, best practice, global solutions across Unilever to meet users’ needs
• Making continuous improvement in both cost and service an integral part of our ways of working
• Building a professional services organization with 3PSP and other stakeholders of the P2P process (i.e., Procurement officers, Global Portfolio team, IT Teams, external suppliers of UL, group of ca. 20.000 P2P users in Europe, MCO local finance leaders) to deliver best in class P2P process for Unilever
• developing win-win relationships with selected providers to meet our current and future requirements
• Working closely with P2P Process Office and Procurement Services to develop practical solutions to performance improvement initiatives
• Drive end-to-end continuous improvement mindset, enabled by Lean Six Sigma root cause analysis techniques.
• Leading Projects acting as Project Manager for the top down and bottom-up initiatives, as well as being SPOC and SME in projects led centrally within the P2P functional area
• Ensure that respective high profile stakeholders from MCOs (UL WL3+) are fully briefed about P2P processes in their regions and manage through dependencies with them in order to achieve all key BFS P2P service line metrics
• Escalate to P2P Service and Delivery Junior Manager items that are not to be resolved on his/her own level.

Stakeholder contacts

Internal:

• MCO Finance Team, Financial Controller
• Global Service Director for P2P
• Directs Procurement Teams Networks
• Indirect’s Procurement/business users
• Planning Teams
• P2P users
• R2R Teams
• Global PEC teams

External:

• 3rd Party Service Providers
• Unilever suppliers

Competencies:

• External Orientation (focus on customer; deliver excellent result)
• Action Not Debate (makes decisions under uncertainty, ensures great execution)
• Team Alignment (team player; supports and respects others)
• Working in partnership with clients, vendors and service providers

Skills:

• Effective communications both written and oral in English
• Project Management & Change Management Facilitation
• Analytics
• Performance improvement
• Organisational Awareness
• Negotiation beneficial, exposure to senior stakeholders
• Ability to work under pressure with often conflicting internal targets
• Strong Excel skills
• Enhance stakeholder experience
• Storytelling
• Strategy
• Working knowledge of SAP (preferred, not necessary)

Experience:

• University Graduate / Qualified accountant /Engineering (or similar experience)
• 6-8 years’ experience in Finance/Supply chain in business partnering an advantage
• Strong knowledge of key Finance and Procurement Contracting processes in S2P area
• High Financial / Supply chain skills
• Service Delivery experience beneficial
• Leadership, collaboration, which will support/challenge/improve ways of working within the S2P area.