Category Advisor

Your new role

Highways England is investing £27bn from 2020 – 2025 across the strategic road network. Our job is to manage and improve the road network to make journeys safer, smoother and more reliable. Here at Highways England, we are constantly challenging ourselves and our supply chain to achieve more for our customers.

As a Category Advisor, you will take on a role key to the success of the Category Management team by providing effective support across a variety of Procurement and Commercial activities for Infrastructure / Construction categories.

This is an active and varied role where you will utilise your excellent relationship skills to engage with a wide range of suppliers to develop performance documentation, capture and analyse data using business reporting tools such as Excel or PowerBi, and apply best practice to deliver outcomes. You will also be responsible for supporting category working groups by developing agendas, presentations and documenting minutes. 

An understanding of the Commercial, Procurement or Supply Chain life cycle is important as you will be interfacing with a range of suppliers and internal/external stakeholders to offer support to colleagues throughout the process. The role would suit an individual with great attention to detail and the ability to translate data insights into tangible intelligence as the role offers the opportunity for you to share category insights and drive process improvement using the intelligence gained through your activities.

We are pleased to offer this role from our Leeds or Birmingham office. A flexible attitude to travel is needed as the successful candidate will be required to travel to Leeds on a regular basis if based in Birmingham.

What you’ll be doing

•    Provide analysis and input on category areas to support strategy development.
•    Support the day-to-day operations for existing arrangements, liaising with suppliers by prioritising delivery according to business need, maintaining an efficient workflow. 
•    Support and develop key documentation for implementation on-demand/efficiencies and performance within category areas.
•    Actively support category working groups and communities by supporting and developing agendas, presentations, documenting minutes and actions.
•    Apply best practices to deliver outcomes and effectively support governance and risk (strategic risks including supplier performance and resilience).
•    Establish and maintain proactive business and supplier relationships to deliver informed reporting and accurate transactions to agreed deadlines includes forecasting data and monitoring against budgets.
•    Actively identify opportunities for innovation within category areas that help meet strategic objectives (e.g. customer engagement etc.). This could include the application of lessons learnt in introducing a new arrangement. 

To be successful

•    You will have experience of working in a Commercial, Procurement and/or Supply Chain environment with knowledge of the procurement lifecycle
•    You will have experience in gathering data, carrying out analysis and performance/efficiency reporting 
•    You will have experience working/collaborating with internal and external stakeholders/customers and/or the supply chain 
•    You will have a high level of IT literacy with good numeracy, analytical and budget management skills. Experience in using a Business Reporting Tool such as PowerBi is desirable
•    You will be able to prioritise effectively to manage multiple deadlines and category milestones

 It would be nice if you also had:

• A Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) Diploma - we offer the opportunity to become CIPS qualified through our bespoke training programme so a willingness to become qualified is a must!

A bit about us

There’s never been a better time to join our Commercial and Procurement team. 
 
We’re a growing, vibrant team helping to drive the most ambitious roads investment programme our country has ever seen. You’ll be involved in ensuring that our customers and road workers get home safe and well every day while travelling or working on our road network.

Want to know more?

To request a copy of the role profile please contact recruitment@highwaysengland.co.uk quoting reference number HIG05084.

Why you should join us

At Highways England we believe in a connected country. We are passionate about creating a culture where colleagues feel connected, included and enjoy greater wellbeing to achieve this.  We’re proud that as an organisation we are continually striving to do better and actively encourage and support our colleagues to do the same with their careers.  

So if you put safety first, take ownership of your work, show passion for what you do, work effectively in a team, and demonstrate integrity in how you do it – then you’ll be a great fit for our organisation.

And finally

And finally, we reserve the right to close before the advertised closing date, so we recommend completing your application as soon as possible.