Chief Procurement Officer and Executive Director of Operations

Position Summary/Description:

The Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) and Executive Director of Operations oversees the University's procurement, card services, travel services, and accounts payable operations. The CPO/Executive Director designs and implements University-wide, data-driven strategic sourcing operations that are integrated with exceptional payment services. The department's financial scope includes expenditures of approximately $900 million per year in materials, supplies and services. The position reports to the Associate Vice Chancellor of Finance.

The CPO/Executive Director is responsible for the performance of the central procurement function that supports the spend management initiatives across the University's academic and administrative units. The position plays a leadership role in the development of effective and efficient spend management practices across the University. This responsibility includes strategic and operational planning, talent and performance management, and execution of initiatives. This will entail the support of new tools and processes, the negotiation of advantageous contracts with vendors, and the coordination of University spend activity to ensure customer satisfaction, compliance, and cost-effectiveness. In addition, the CPO/Executive Director will build strong relationships and coalitions across the University that will foster consensus for spend management initiatives.

The position leads a team of senior spend management professionals, across all areas of the source to settlement lifecycle, to transform the nature of their work from transaction management to spend management. To complement this effort, the CPO/Executive Director will focus on talent management best practices to elevate the depth and breadth of the team.

The position is responsible for ensuring the highest levels of satisfaction among University faculty and staff, optimizing savings through consolidated procurement and contracts while sustaining compliance with University policies and maintaining the highest integrity in all contracting, purchasing, and payment activities.

The CPO/Executive Director partners in a leadership capacity with key stakeholders across campus to ensure effective and efficient purchasing and payment services. This position leads and delivers change and seeks to align campus activity with best practice. This position leads through consensus, strong analytics, and benchmarking.

Education and Experience:

The CPO/Executive Director will possess many of the following professional and personal characteristics:

• Strong business and financial acumen. Must have outstanding problem-solving skills. Ability to take a creative approach to procurement/payment and business opportunities. Must be comfortable functioning as a business partner and driver of change.
• Strong relationship building, negotiating, and influencing skills.
• Experience in understanding business processes and reengineering those to work efficiently and effectively.
• Demonstrated leadership ability in supervising and developing staff with an emphasis on customer service.
• Excellent communication skills, both verbal and written.
• Ability to take initiative, have the drive to complete projects and provide creative, resourceful, flexible approaches to solving issues.
• Maintain confidentiality at all times and operate with integrity.
• Experience implementing systems and tools to optimize procurement spend, identify metrics and benchmarks to track performance, and instill a continuous improvement culture on the Procurement team.

Essential Skills:

Minimum of eight years of senior-level experience working within a broad range of stakeholders, either in the private sector or in a higher education environment. The CPO will be a persuasive communicator and possess the ability to present effectively to a wide constituency including senior campus leaders, managers, unit staff, and campus personnel. The ideal candidate will have a background in building consensus on difficult, complex issues that affect large or critical audiences.