VMO Manager - Strategic Vendor Management CoE Lead

Our client, a leading Consumer Goods Manufacturing Company is looking for VMO Manager - Strategic Vendor Management CoE Lead and This is for an initial duration of 06 Months Contract Remote Role

Job Title: VMO Manager - Strategic Vendor Management CoE Lead Job Id: 26-00566 Location: Remote Role Duration: 06 Months Contract Position Type: Hourly Contract Position (W2 only)
Vendor Management Office (VMO) Manager - Strategic Vendor Management CoE Lead

• Candidates can be 100% remote, but seeking them to be in CST or EST.
• Candidates must have global vendor management experience along with Coupa experience.
• Candidates should be experienced in governance and rogue spend tracking, vendor negotiations, and organizational change management.
• This person will oversee the strategic vendor spend up to $200M.
• Direct budget ownership of $600-700k internal labor resource costs.

Our Mission and Opportunity:

• client has entered a transformational era of new technology and innovation.
• As we grow, the scale and speed in how we leverage data-driven will be paramount to our source of competitive advantage. It's critical to ensure our highly complex organization operates in a more efficient manner to enable the exceptional experiences we desire for our customers, partners, and employees.

Role Overview:

• The Strategic Vendor Management Lead is responsible for establishing and leading the Vendor Management Office (VMO) Center of Excellence (CoE), ensuring vendor engagement, performance, and governance are executed with discipline, transparency, and strategic alignment.
• This leader will develop and implement vendor management frameworks, oversee strategic supplier relationships, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. By balancing a results-driven approach with collaborative partnership, the leader empowers teams to maximize value, mitigate risk, and maintain control across the enterprise vendor landscape.

Core Responsibilities:

• The VMO CoE Lead is responsible for transforming vendor management into a proactive, strategic function that drives measurable business value and innovation. This leader develops and implements end-to-end processes for vendor lifecycle management including selection, onboarding, performance, renewal, and exit while ensuring governance, compliance, and cross-functional collaboration.
• The role oversees contingent workforce management strategy, preferred supplier programs, and demand pipeline oversight, and establishes a comprehensive vendor database and deal pipeline to enable effective sourcing and negotiation. By segmenting vendors, setting review cadences, and benchmarking performance, the VMO CoE Lead fosters strong partnerships, optimizes costs, mitigates risk, and champions a shift from cost savings to value creation and continuous improvement across the enterprise.

Info

• Leadership: Build and lead a high-performing vendor management team, providing coaching, career development, and fostering a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Strategy & Governance: Own end-to-end processes for the vendor lifecycle (selection, onboarding, performance, renewal, exit) and establish governance models that promote transparency and accountability.
• Continuous Improvement: Lead initiatives to optimize vendor management practices, leveraging industry trends and lessons learned. Define and implement vendor management standards, frameworks, and tools to ensure consistent, scalable, and effective engagement.
• Capability Building & Stakeholder Engagement: Drive adoption of vendor management best practices across the organization by leading workshops, creating guides, and managing change communications. Partner with teams to uplift maturity and embed standardized processes.
• Vendor & Workforce Management: Build and maintain strong, mutually beneficial relationships with key vendors through executive-level reviews and strategic engagement. Lead contingent workforce strategy, including preferred supplier programs, rate card adherence, and demand pipeline oversight.
• Data & Performance Management: Develop and maintain vendor performance dashboards, scorecards, and reporting tools to monitor KPIs, risk, and value delivery. Provide actionable insights through advanced analytics and visualization for stakeholders at all levels.
• Deal Pipeline & Vendor Database: Develop and maintain a comprehensive vendor database, benchmark vendor performance and costs and establish a deal pipeline to enable proactive sourcing, negotiation, and relationship management.
• Market Intelligence & Innovation Track industry trends and vendor capabilities to inform sourcing decisions and recommend strategic shifts based on market dynamics.
• Financial Transparency: Partner with finance and procurement teams to manage vendor contracts, budgets, and ROI tracking. Support planning cycles and business case development for new vendor engagements.

Key Deliverables / Value Enabled:

• Strategic Vendor Alignment: Ensures vendor engagements are aligned with enterprise priorities, enabling the organization to invest in the right partnerships at the right time.
• Governance Maturity: Establishes scalable governance frameworks that drive accountability, transparency, and timely decision-making in vendor management.
• Performance Visibility: Delivers dashboards and reporting that provide actionable insights into vendor health, risks, and performance.
• Resource Optimization: Improves capacity planning and resource allocation across vendor engagements, reducing bottlenecks and increasing throughput.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Strengthens alignment between business, IT, finance, and procurement teams, ensuring shared ownership of vendor outcomes.
• Scalable Vendor Practices: Enables consistent vendor management execution across departments by standardizing tools, templates, and processes.
• Enhanced Compliance: Ensures all vendor activities adhere to established standards and policies, reducing risk of non-compliance.

Required Qualifications:

• Vendor Management Expertise: 10+ years of experience in vendor management, procurement, or strategic sourcing roles, with a strong understanding of contract negotiation, performance management, and risk mitigation.
• Governance Leadership: Proven ability to design and facilitate governance forums, decision-making frameworks, and executive steering committees.
• Strategic Alignment: Experience aligning vendor strategies with enterprise objectives, ensuring visibility and accountability.
• Analytical & Financial Acumen: Strong analytical skills with experience in budget oversight, financial modeling, and performance reporting.
• Stakeholder Engagement: Exceptional ability to engage and influence senior leaders, communicate complex information clearly, and drive alignment across functions.
• Tool Proficiency: Expertise in vendor management and procurement tools (e.g., SAP Ariba, Coupa, Power BI, Beeline, or equivalent platforms).
• Change Enablement: Experience leading vendor management transformation initiatives and embedding best practices across delivery teams.

Preferred Skills:

• Problem Solving / Decision Making: Organized, analytical, and with an extensive attention to detail with a demonstrated ability to identify inefficiencies, assess their magnitude, prioritize for resolution, and apply a new perspective to solve complex problems.
• Influencing: Organizationally savvy, with good interpersonal effectiveness, influence, and ability to get things done through both formal and informal means. Develop positive relationships, building support and agreement, with business leaders, enablement teams, and project team members to drive consistent change strategies and approaches.
• Navigating Change and Ambiguity: Demonstrates resilience by guiding others in adapting to unknown challenges, limitations, and setbacks. Effectively frames, recognizes, and evaluates underlying assumptions and potential changes, assessing their effects on tasks, the teams, and oneself, even when information is incomplete or unclear.
• Customer Value Creation: Proactively identifies, recommends, and implements value-added solutions to strengthen relationships within the organization, providing insights on downstream outcomes, and recommending alternative solutions.
• Collaboration: Exceptional ability to collaborate, influence, mobilize, and energize key stakeholders and complex cross-organizational and cross-functional teams to implement creative, innovative, best-in-class solutions.
• People & Culture: Knack and passion for tuning into unique cultures, needs, and sentiments of impacted stakeholders. Skilled in active listening and cultivating meaningful feedback loops. Listening with compassion and turning insights into action.
• Executive Communication & Writing Skills: Able to distill complex data and details to extract and articulate insights and translate them into audience-appropriate messages. Tunes into the needs of the audience to adjust tone and messaging; building and presenting compelling presentations for executives as well as developing detailed materials for employees.

Compensation: The hourly rate for this position is between $98.00-$103.00 per hour.

Factors which may affect starting pay within this range may include [geography/market, skills, education, experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate].

Benefits: Sunrise offers ACA compliant medical coverage/dental insurance/vision insurance to all employees. We also offer Sick time benefits as required per State regulations.