About This Role
This newly created role offers the opportunity to shape how vendor management operates across a complex organisation. You will establish and develop a central vendor management framework, bringing greater consistency, transparency, and control across the full vendor lifecycle. The role involves creating a consolidated view of performance, risk, commercial exposure, contractual obligations, resilience, and key dependencies for strategic and critical vendors.
Responsibilities
- Establish, own, and continuously evolve the central vendor management framework, including appropriate standards, lifecycle controls, governance, roles, and minimum requirements
- Provide portfolio level oversight of strategic, critical, and high-risk vendors, maintaining a clear view across performance, contracts, spend, risk, issues, dependencies, and criticality
- Establish effective vendor governance, performance measures, KPIs, SLAs, and scorecards, challenging persistent underperformance and ensuring material issues and recovery actions are driven through to closure
- Maintain oversight of contract milestones, renewals, and key obligations, working closely with Procurement and other functions to identify commercial opportunities, risks, and required actions
- Identify and manage portfolio-wide vendor risks and dependencies, including concentration, resilience, continuity, and exit considerations across critical third parties
- Produce clear vendor MI, dashboards, and executive insight, bringing together inputs from across the organisation to support informed decisions and continuously improve the maturity of vendor management
Requirements
- Strong experience across vendor management, supplier management, third-party management, procurement governance, or outsourcing oversight within a large, complex organisation
- Experience managing or providing oversight across a portfolio of strategic or critical vendors, rather than focusing solely on individual suppliers or contracts
- Strong understanding of the end-to-end vendor lifecycle, including governance, performance management, contractual oversight, risk, resilience, and escalation
- Ability to interpret commercial, contractual, operational, and risk information and translate this into clear, actionable management insight
- Experience producing meaningful dashboards, scorecards, and management information for senior stakeholders, with strong analytical and organisational capability
- Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to coordinate effectively across Procurement, Risk, Legal, Finance, Technology, and business teams without relying on direct authority
Nice to have:
- Experience establishing, designing, or maturing an enterprise vendor management framework or capability
