Category Manager

As a Category/Commodity Manager within Hitachi Energy's Grid Automation business, you will play a key role in supporting the sourcing and supply chain activities that help deliver reliable power infrastructure projects across North America. You will own assigned spend categories and develop sourcing strategies that balance cost, quality, supply reliability, and performance while supporting tendering, project execution, supplier quality, and cost-reduction initiatives. Working closely with proposal teams, project execution teams, engineering, operational buying, supplier quality, and global category teams, you will help ensure critical materials and equipment are available to support project delivery goals. This role offers the opportunity to influence supplier performance, lead strategic sourcing activities, negotiate contracts and commercial terms, support continuous improvement initiatives, and contribute to supply chain resilience across a complex project environment. Your work will help strengthen supplier partnerships, improve total cost of ownership, support quality and delivery performance, and contribute to the successful execution of projects that support the modernization and reliability of the power grid. This role will be working in an extremely fast-paced tender and project execution environment.

• Develop and execute sourcing strategies for assigned categories to improve total cost of ownership, supply reliability, and supplier performance.
• Manage category performance against key supply chain metrics including cost reduction, cost avoidance, payment terms, on-time delivery, and spend under frame agreements.
• Negotiate contracts, service level agreements, commercial terms, pricing, lead times, and related supplier agreements.
• Evaluate supplier quotations, support RFQ activities, and contribute to bidding, tendering, and project budgeting activities.
• Build, qualify, develop, and manage supplier relationships to support business growth, quality targets, and supply continuity.
• Lead supplier qualification, risk assessments, audits, performance reviews, and supplier development activities.
• Support cost reduction, value engineering, Design to Value (DtV), supplier rationalization, and process improvement initiatives.
• Collaborate with Marketing & Sales, Engineering, Quality, Operations, Project Management, Contract Management, Legal, supplier quality teams, and global category stakeholders to improve quality, material availability, and business performance.
• Responsible for ensuring compliance with applicable external and internal regulations, procedures, and guidelines.

• Candidate must already have work authorization that would permit them to work for Hitachi Energy in the United States.
• Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain Management, or a similar field; 8-10 years of experience may be considered in lieu of education.
• Minimum 5 years of Supply Chain Management experience, preferably in Category Management or Strategic Sourcing within multinational companies.
• Experience driving strategic category strategies and developing new approaches to meet the highly demanding nature of the power automation business
• Knowledge of assigned categories and understanding of commodity impacts on final cost.
• Experience sourcing industrial, electrical, electronic, automation, or capital goods used in project-based businesses.
• Strong quality and continuous improvement aptitude in the supplier environment
• Ability to work across multinational matrix organizations and collaborate with supplier quality engineers, engineering teams, suppliers, and cross-functional stakeholders; flexibility to travel up to 25%.