Manager – Category Management

Business context

The Cooling Line of Business designs and manufactures the thermal management portfolio that keeps data centres running — from chillers and CDUs supporting high-density liquid-cooled AI racks, through to in-room, InRow and Fan Wall air cooling. Demand in this segment is growing faster than the supply base can naturally absorb, while the refrigeration component market is simultaneously being reshaped by low-GWP refrigerant transitions, A2L safety requirements, regional trade barriers and extended lead times on critical items.

The F7 category group covers the core refrigeration and thermal content of these products and represents roughly €250 million of global annual spend. It is one of the highest-leverage categories in the Cooling LoB: it drives a large share of product cost, it sits on the critical path of every offer lead time, and it carries the highest technical qualification burden. Category Managers in this group are part of the Cooling LoB Procurement team and operate globally, across all five manufacturing sites and their design centres.

Purpose of the role

Own the end-to-end performance of an assigned portfolio within  HVAC Category  — cost, quality, continuity of supply, supplier risk, innovation and sustainability — by building and executing a global sourcing strategy and a qualified, competitive, resilient supplier panel that supports both the installed base and the new-product pipeline.

The role is expected to lead, not administer: to form a point of view on the market, to challenge specifications with engineering, to consolidate demand across plants that have historically bought independently, and to secure supply for a business whose volumes are scaling rapidly.

Key responsibilities

Category strategy and market intelligence

• Build, own and refresh the global category strategy for the assigned portfolio, including segmentation, make-vs-buy, supplier panel design, share-of-category (SOC) evolution, supplier reduction and concentration targets, and a 3-year roadmap.
• Maintain a live view of the supplier market: capacity, capability, technology roadmaps, financial health, ownership changes, capacity expansions and regional cost positions.
• Run structured cost-driver analysis — raw material indices (copper, aluminium, steel), energy, labour, freight, currency — and translate movements into negotiation positions and price-adjustment mechanisms.
• Benchmark landed cost across regions and identify low-cost-country and localisation opportunities, taking tariffs, duties, logistics and qualification cost into account.
• Consolidate demand across the five plants and across brands; eliminate duplicate part numbers and fragmented buying of technically equivalent items.

 Cost and productivity delivery

• Own the annual productivity target for the portfolio and build a bottom-up, project-level plan to deliver it, with named actions, owners and dates.
• Deliver savings through the full lever set: negotiation, competitive re-sourcing, volume consolidation, design-to-value/QVE, specification simplification, alternate makes, localisation, logistics redesign and payment-term improvement.
• Build and use should-cost and clean-sheet models for the main component families; open supplier cost breakdowns rather than negotiating on lump-sum price.
• Manage inflation and raw-material exposure actively — index-linked clauses, hedging support, timing of price agreements, cost-avoidance tracking.
• Validate savings with Finance and Controlling and ensure they land in standard cost and in the P&L.

Supplier panel and relationship management

• Establish and maintain the qualified supplier panel; decide regional panels in alignment with the global strategy and drive migration of spend towards preferred suppliers.
• Lead sourcing events end to end: RFI/RFQ preparation, technical and commercial evaluation, TCO comparison, award recommendation and internal approval.
• Negotiate and maintain the contractual framework — LTSA/LTA, frame agreements, pricing schedules, capacity commitments, tooling ownership, IP, warranty, liability, spare-parts and end-of-life terms.
• Run formal supplier relationship management for strategic suppliers: quarterly business reviews, scorecards, joint improvement plans and escalation paths.
• Develop suppliers rather than only selecting them — capacity ramp-up plans, process capability improvement, cost-reduction workshops, co-investment where justified.

Supply assurance, risk and resilience

• Guarantee continuity of supply for a fast-ramping business: capacity reservation, long-term supply assurance plans, buffer and safety-stock strategies, and lead-time reduction programmes on critical components.
• Maintain a risk map for the portfolio covering single-source dependency, geographic concentration, sub-tier and raw-material exposure, financial distress, geopolitical and trade risk; define and execute mitigation plans.
• Drive dual-sourcing and alternate-make qualification for all critical and single-sourced items, with a defined target coverage.
• Lead crisis and shortage management — allocation, expediting, escalation to supplier senior management, and recovery plans agreed with plants and Supply Chain.
• Anticipate obsolescence and end-of-life announcements; secure last-time buys or qualify replacements ahead of impact.

Quality and supplier performance

• Own the supplier performance matrix for the portfolio — quality (PPM/DPPM, escapes, 8D closure), delivery (OTIF, lead time, backlog), responsiveness, productivity and risk — and drive corrective action where performance is off target.
• Partner with Supplier Quality and Plant Quality on new-supplier qualification, PPAP/FAI, process audits, change control (PCN/ECN) and containment of field issues.
• Support warranty and field-failure investigations with commercial recovery from suppliers where accountability is established.

New product introduction and design-to-value

• Represent Procurement from the earliest phase of NPI projects with the Offer Creation Process (OCP) teams and design centres across BUs, so that supplier selection, cost targets and lead times are set at design freeze rather than after it.
• Bring supplier technology and early supplier involvement into design; challenge over-specification, non-standard parts and single-source design choices.
• Own component cost targets in the project business case and track actual vs target through to launch.
• Ensure supplier readiness at SOP: capacity, tooling, qualification, logistics flow and ramp plan agreed and evidenced.
• Drive part standardisation and re-use across chillers, CDU, CRAC/CRAH, InRow and Fan Wall platforms to reduce the total part count and increase volume leverage per supplier.

 Compliance, sustainability and governance

• Ensure supplier and component compliance with applicable regulation and standards — pressure equipment (PED/ASME), refrigerant regulation and low-GWP/A2L transition requirements, UL/CE and product safety, REACH/RoHS, conflict minerals and trade/export controls.
• Deliver the category contribution to decarbonisation and responsible-sourcing commitments: supplier CO₂ data, recycled and low-carbon material content, packaging reduction and supplier sustainability assessments.
• Operate within Group procurement policy, delegation of authority, ethics and anti-corruption rules; maintain complete and auditable sourcing documentation.

Leadership and stakeholder management

• Lead cross-functional sourcing teams (Engineering, Quality, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Finance, Legal) without hierarchical authority, and hold them to committed dates.
• Work as a single point of contact for plants in all regions on the assigned portfolio, aligning global strategy with local execution realities.
• Coach and support regional buyers and plant procurement teams in applying the category strategy.
• Communicate clearly to senior management — concise strategy papers, business cases, risk escalations and performance reviews.

Qualifications and experience

Essential

• Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical, , Thermal Engineering , A postgraduate management qualification (MBA) or professional certification (CIPS, CPSM) is valued.
• Minimum 10 years in procurement, sourcing or category management, of which at least 3–5 in a category or strategic sourcing role with direct-material spend ownership.
• Proven track record of delivering multi-million-euro productivity in a manufacturing environment, evidenced with numbers.
• Hands-on experience of the full sourcing cycle: strategy, RFQ, should-cost, negotiation, contracting, supplier development and performance management.
• Experience working across multiple countries and plants, with the cultural agility to operate effectively in Europe, Asia and the Americas.
• Strong analytical capability — able to build and defend spend analyses, cost models and business cases; confident with Excel and BI tools.
• Demonstrated negotiation skill on complex, technically constrained, sole- or limited-source situations.
• Business-fluent English, written and spoken.

Strongly preferred

• HVAC&R, thermal management, refrigeration, industrial cooling or data-centre infrastructure industry background.
• Working technical knowledge of the vapour-compression cycle and of refrigeration components — sufficient to read a P&ID and a component datasheet, interrogate a supplier’s design and challenge an engineering specification with credibility.
• Familiarity with low-GWP refrigerant transition (A2L and related safety, PED, F-Gas and equivalent regional regulation) and its supply-base implications.
• Exposure to liquid cooling / CDU content — pumps, BPHE, quick disconnects, coolant loop cleanliness and leak integrity.
• Experience of engineered-to-order and configured-to-order product environments, where volumes are variable and lead times are the constraint.
• SAP and e-sourcing/contract-management platform experience; Power BI or equivalent.
• Additional language relevant to the supply base (Mandarin, Italian, Spanish).

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