Senior Director, Direct Materials Procurement

ICU Medical•Lake Forest, IL

11d

About The Position

The Senior Director of Direct Materials Procurement is responsible for enterprise-wide Direct Materials strategy, governance, and performance across Consumables, Electronics, and Purchased Finished Goods. This role provides end-to-end leadership of the Direct Materials procurement operating model, ensuring alignment between category strategies, business priorities, and long-term supply resilience within the enterprise procurement strategy. The Senior Director will: Provide strategic leadership and direction to the Direct Sourcing teams engaged with the categories with the goal of supporting The Company’s Procurement needs, achieving year-over-year cost savings while driving continuous improvement in quality, service and innovation. Staff, develop, and build leadership capability within a global direct sourcing team, including directors and senior category leaders, that will drive sustained performance and improve procurement effectiveness. Drive a culture of continuous improvement and organization excellence. Sustain category expertise through an understanding of supply markets and trends, cost drivers and the internal business impact. Lead the team and guide them in strategic sourcing processes that leverage scale, maximize supplier relationships, minimize risks and drive business value. Establish the Direct Materials sourcing strategy framework and guide the development of effective sourcing strategies, ensuring consistency, prioritization, and alignment with enterprise objectives. Enhance processes to build strategic relationships that leverage supplier capabilities and reduce total cost of ownership. Create and implement a continuous-improvement sourcing approach for key spend areas. Act as a point of contact to resolve escalated issues from the Procurement team or stakeholders. Collaborate with key stakeholders and work cross-functionally in developing and executing sourcing strategies and material procurement plans. Own the Direct Materials procurement operating model, including governance, decision rights, performance management, and capability standards across all direct categories.

Requirements

Strong leadership skills and communication skills
Ability to lead through leaders, manage competing priorities across portfolios, and balance enterprise objectives with category-level execution.
Influencing Skills and Lateral Leadership: Ability to build relationships and credibility across the organization; collaborates effectively with cross functional teams; able to function in a highly matrixed environment.
Executional Excellence: Ability to get things done and multi-task; acts with a sense of urgency; able to prioritize; excellent decision making/judgment skills.
Strategic approach: Creates a portfolio-level vision and strategy, understands interdependencies across categories and balances short-term results with long-term capability.
Strategic Sourcing expertise: Understands sourcing methodologies and tools; keeps abreast of external market fundamentals, utilizes cost models and appropriate e-sourcing tools; business and financial acumen.
Strong negotiation skills; exceptional problem solving and analytical skills.
Knowledge of material planning fundamentals
Supplier relationship management
Risk management
Business and financial acumen
Must be at least 18 years of age.
Bachelor’s degree in purchasing, engineering, finance or business administration from an accredited college or university is required; advanced degree (MBA) strongly preferred.
Extensive 15+ years of progressive experience in operations and supply chain, including 10+ years in Procurement and a minimum of 7+ years leading managers or Directors in a complex, matrixed environment.
Demonstrated experience owning a multi-category or portfolio-level procurement scope, with accountability for aggregated performance across Direct Materials.
Experience influencing and advising senior executive leadership on sourcing strategy, risk trade-offs, and investment decisions.
Demonstrated success building leadership capability, succession pipelines, and high-performing management teams.
Broad and practical experience across procurement disciplines, including category management, supplier management, negotiations, contract management, and e-procurement systems.

Nice To Haves

advanced degree (MBA) strongly preferred.
Relevant experience managing Strategic Sourcing in a global, highly regulated industry (e.g. pharmaceutical, food) preferred.
Documented track record of developing and deploying sourcing strategies that have delivered sustained, enterprise-impacting business results.

Responsibilities

Understand spend across the business, analyze category markets and translate into actionable strategies and forward-looking analyses.
Lead, manage, and develop direct reports with a focus on succession planning, leadership readiness, and long-term capability building across the Direct Materials organization.
Accountable for the performance, development, and results of Directors and their respective category portfolios across Direct Materials.
Develop deep category expertise, maintain market intelligence and stay abreast of the changing supply base and new technologies.
Oversee the end-to-end strategic sourcing process and guide sourcing teams through spend management and development of sourcing strategies.
Support New Product Development by ensuring early and proactive alignment between the cross functional teams on the procurement strategy, foster early supplier involvement and leverage supplier relationships to optimize timelines and costs to the program.
Collaborate with key stakeholders upstream and downstream to ensure early engagement, strong buy-in, and shared ownership of key sourcing strategies.
Direct and develop a globally distributed sourcing organization that enables a step-change improvement in procurement performance.
Provide clarity, focus, direction, set priorities and objectives, and through effective leadership, enable direct reports to deliver against clearly defined category and team targets.
Assure direct reports develop, align, and maintain robust, value-driven strategies that deliver sustainable benefits.
Provide strategic customer relationship management to key stakeholders, assuring procurement support is aligned with stakeholder interests and business needs, and providing key and objective insights to assure optimized procurement approach and decisions are made. Includes advising senior leadership on Direct Materials trade-offs, risk posture, and strategic options, while ensuring alignment with enterprise procurement direction.
Strengthen and continuously improve market expertise, maintain commercial acumen across assigned spend categories and stay current on supply market trends, business economics and sourcing best practices that impact the supply market and/or supplier economics.
Lead and develop proactive risk management strategies, increasing awareness and ensuring implementation of mitigation plans in close partnership with business stakeholders.
Drive aggregated Direct Materials value delivery, including measurable annual cost savings, working capital, risk mitigation, and supplier performance, and ensure transparency of results to senior leadership.
Drive sourcing best practices across company for assigned spend categories, ensuring compliance with all policies and procedures and maintaining a working knowledge of applicable federal, state, and local laws and regulations.
Lead Supplier Management and utilize continuous improvement methodologies to resolve issues and elevate supplier performance.
Serve as the senior escalation point for critical supplier contract negotiations and high-impact supplier issues.