Procurement Lead (South East Asia)

Role Purpose

The purpose of this role is to lead and deliver procurement activity across the Compass South East Asia (SEA) business in Singapore & Hong Kong, ensuring robust category execution, cost optimisation, supplier performance and compliance. The Procurement Lead will inspire and motivate their team by creating a high-performance culture, embedding a true procurement mindset, and striving for procurement excellence across every aspect of their team's activity and delivery. The role operates as a player-manager, with the majority of time focused on hands-on procurement delivery, supported by a smaller strategic contribution.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, inspire and motivate the procurement team to plan, develop and execute procurement activity that delivers the KPIs and year on year improved sustainable commercial results.

• Lead collaboration, alignment, and structured interaction with all functions operations, culinary, finance, HSE and IT to drive performance and delivery together.

• Develop and encourage a diverse team of individuals to operate with a procurement mindset ensuring pace, passion and resilience.

• Engage with clients and operations to share procurement insight, understand challenges and develop effective solutions that create unique selling points for Compass SEA.

• Embed structure, governance, and process within in the team to deliver market leading procurement performance and product costs.

• Deploy proven category development activity to unlock new opportunities through interrogating data, category planning, product & supplier optimisation, sector/culinary collaboration, setting sector standards and driving volume through best value products, unlocking incremental value from supplier relationships/JBP's, cost benchmarking, contract coverage across all spend and driving continuous improvement in data integrity.

• Personally own and deliver key categories, supplier negotiations and commercial outcomes, acting as a hands-on procurement lead where scale or complexity requires.

• Support the continued evolution of procurement from a tactical function to a strategic contributor, by improving category maturity, data transparency, and stakeholder engagement.

• Embed and consistently apply Compass Group procurement best practice, processes and ways of working in day-to-day procurement delivery across SEA.

• Own the effective use of procurement data and systems in SEA and partner with APAC/global teams to improve visibility, control and insight.

• Build strong sustainable relationships with key strategic suppliers to leverage and deliver value.

• Drive improvements in sustainability and ESG, aligned to Compass Group's global strategy as well as local laws and targets. This includes but is not limited to embedding Supply Chain Risk Management with a key focus on Human Rights and Environment, animal welfare, DEI and climate targets.

• Compliance with all legal, regulatory, and corporate governance requirements.

Role Dimensions

• Oversee delivery of procurement activity.

• Lead a team of approximately 4 people nationally across Singapore & Hong Kong.

• Direct accountability for selected critical categories and strategic supplier relationships in addition to leadership responsibilities.

• Strong Communication & influencing skills.

• Good understanding of food safety and good manufacturing practices.

Candidate Profile

• A dynamic, energetic & creative leader that can define a long-term vision for success whilst delivering tangible progress across the short, medium & long term.

• Strong commercial acumen to maximise results and challenge the status quo.

• A great optimistic attitude, approaches challenges with a positive & solution-based mindset.

• An ability to make effective decisions under pressure with an abundance of resilience & tenacity.

• Drive to operate at pace in a rapidly changing environment and manage multiple agendas/priorities.

• Excellent coaching skills to develop their team and ensure clear succession planning.

• Inspires, motivates & builds trust with their team and all other functions across the business.

• Role models being curious with data & insight to unlock commercial opportunity embedding a procurement mindset.

• Ability to build strong collaborative relationships & successfully influence at all levels.

• Identifies areas for improvement & drives change throughout the organisation to improve efficiency.

• Celebrates success and recognises the contribution of the team & colleagues around them.

• Recognised for strong commercial judgement and practical problem-solving, able to advise stakeholders based on data, experience and insight.

• Proven execution skills, an ability to successfully execute against their strategies/plans collaboratively with others

• Procurement expertise / experience is highly desirable