Head of Vendor Management and Procurement, Central Services

Practice Group / Department: Finance and Tax

Job Description

We are a global law firm with a powerful strategic focus and real momentum. Our industry-focused strategy is seeing us take on pioneering work in places that others have yet to reach. Our shared values define our culture and our workplace. You will find us to be unusually collegial, team-oriented, and ready to innovate. We work seamlessly across practices, offices and around the world. This elimination of boundaries has allowed us to evolve into a law firm that works as hard for its culture as it does for its clients.

The Role

The management of the global and multi-regional suppliers is an essential factor in the success of Norton Rose Fulbright. The Head of Vendor Management & Procurement will be required to lead the strategic sourcing and procurement across a total spend of approximately $150M and growing.

Key Responsibilities

1. Work closely with the regional leads of the Vendor Management and/or Procurement teams to ensure a consistent and standardized approach to all processes and policies implemented, and tools adopted.
2. Innovate the direction of the function to ensure continued alignment to the strategic priorities of the firm and market standards (for example ESG).
3. Lead with vision in improving centralized procurement to be faster, more efficient and have an increased element of automation.
4. Manage & maintain the structure of the function's processes and data including, but not limited to: Contract Database; Benefits Tracker; Work in Progress Tracker; Methodologies, Policies & Processes; Vendor Categorization & Governance Frameworks.
5. Work closely with the C-suite management to highlight areas of improvement, business risk, and any performance issues with suppliers.
6. Work closely with a variety of senior stakeholders including Finance, Legal, Data Protection, Security and IT to maintain adherence to standards in procuring goods and services for the firm.
7. Improve general reporting from the function.
8. Play an active role in the budgeting process both globally and across the five member firms.
9. Build insights to key strategic vendors to build NRF intelligence and develop supplier strategies.
10. Own the relationships for a mix of strategic and transactional suppliers, including their overall performance; information must be collated in order to provide a holistic view of supplier performance to brief Norton Rose Fulbright stakeholders and as input to governance meetings.
11. Adhere to agreed supplier governance / chair regular supplier relationship management governance meetings to ensure any supplier relationship, delivery, quality or commercial issues are highlighted and resolved.
12. Manage against budget including authorizing spend against that budget tracking actual spend to provide good financial control over commercial performance.
13. Understand the key cost drivers behind supplier invoices and review supplier invoices for accuracy (and approve / reject as appropriate) in order to ensure suppliers are billing accurately and in line with contract.
14. Drive supplier innovation, cost reduction and performance improvement in order to maximize the value from supplier relationships over and above contractual commitments.
15. Manage supplier commercial issues and negotiate their settlement to avoid escalation of such commercial issues into legal dispute.
16. Own the negotiation of all contracts that are global and/or multi-regional.
17. Be the firm's contact person for any client audit requests in regard to third party contracts.

Manage a team to:

1. Maintain supplier documentation including contract changes, reports, notices and relevant supporting materials are stored with controlled access.
2. Drive actions, minutes, management pack preparation and associated execution from the vendor and internal governance forums.
3. Model contracted charges including contract changes to provide accurate forecasts of spend, total cost of ownership, contract cost to complete, phasing of spend, build of detailed budgets.
4. Manage end to end in-life contract changes for strategic suppliers in close collaboration with global and regional procurement teams as appropriate.
5. Financial management of strategic suppliers managing indexation / foreign exchange variation, rate card validation and change.

Skills and Experience Required

1. 5+ years' experience of management of multi-million-dollar outsourced IT supplier relationships; within legal services or professional services organizations preferable but not essential.
2. A degree in commercial management or procurement would be beneficial.
3. Ability to build strong trusting relationships with business partners and suppliers.
4. Experience building collaborative environments, teaming cultures, and with engaging executives in the strategy development and financial management processes.
5. Demonstrated experience in problem-solving, consensus building, and negotiation.
6. Strong commercial awareness alongside risk management.
7. Knowledge of contract law and IT Service Delivery Management (ITIL) preferred but not essential.
8. Proficiency in Microsoft Office suite in particular data manipulation in Excel and presentation build in PowerPoint.
9. Experience of working in a global company and global capacity and the associated complexity on stakeholder management preferred but not essential.