About The Role
Overall Role Purpose
The Strategic Procurement Business Partner helps people with sight loss to live the life they choose by working in partnership with the ELT and Senior Leaders in their assigned categories, in providing specialist procurement and commercial strategy advice to ensure best use of donor money for our services.
Support the Head of Procurement Services in delivering the Procurement strategy supporting delivery of the Guide Dogs strategy, achieving value for money whilst managing commercial risk to ensure that Guide Dogs is commercial in all that it does.
Key Responsibilities
* Strategic alignment: Create commercial procurement strategies to support ELT & Directorates to deliver their services in the most effective and efficient way whilst ensuring strategies align with the wider Guide Dogs strategy.
* Commercial Development & Innovation: Pro-actively seeking out potential cost savings, innovative opportunities and efficiencies working up ideas into commercially viable business cases and following through to completion with the most appropriate commercial strategy for success.
* Leadership Engagement: Working with ELT and Senior Leaders to develop commercial strategies, play a leading part in their assigned directorate(s) contributing equally at senior management and Director level daily.
* Compliance Management: Ensuring compliance with Guide Dogs commercial policies and managing any areas of non-compliance. Failure of the Strategic Procurement Business Partner to ensure compliance with legislation could result in Guide Dogs receiving severe financial penalty and/or adverse publicity with Guide Dogs exposed to risk and criticism.
* Data drive insights: Utilise data analysis and metrics to proactively develop commercial strategies to deliver best value.
* Delivery: Management of complex pre-tender and tender processes including supplier selection, internal stakeholder management, conflict resolution, documentation, contract negotiation, contract implementation and commercial evaluation. Negotiations must maximise the cost savings potential, ensure robust commercial practices; ensure security of supply, service, quality and delivery
* Relationship building: Ability to effectively negotiate and influence at all levels, specifically at ELT and Senior Leader level but including with; suppliers, especially long-standing third-party partners, other Guide Dogs stakeholders.
* Challenge: Ability to appropriately challenge the status quo when there are better commercial opportunities, and able to work with the department to implement change.
Breadth/Scope of Accountability
People Accountability
Number of Direct Reports: None
Number of Indirect Reports: None, however the role will be expected to matrix manage resource for some procurement activities.
Number of Volunteers Supervised: None
Financial Accountability
Annual Income Accountability: Savings achieved of approx. 10% per annum of third party spend.
Assets Managed: None
Budget Accountability: None
Application of this Job Profile
All employees are required to carry out other such duties as may reasonably be required to fulfil their role and support functional and organisational objectives.
All employees must also:
* Comply with all organisational policies
* Promote the vision and values of the organisation
* Engage in continuous personal development
This job profile is accurate as at the date shown above. It does not form part of contractual terms and may be varied to reflect or anticipate changes to the role.
About Us
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How to apply
Further details on the full role are attached below. When you are ready to apply, submit an online application form via this page.
If you would like to have an informal conversation about the role before applying, or require any accessibility support to apply, our friendly recruitment team is ready and waiting to help. Call them on or drop an email to
As part of your application ensure you provide evidence and examples of how your skills & experience meet the criteria as set out in the attached job description. You will also be asked to complete a few job-specific questions as part of this application process, so please be prepared to write your answers to these questions.
If you want to know more about the teams who work at Guide Dogs, you can find it on our Careers Page
Our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion
Guide Dogs welcomes applications from all sections of the community and actively encourages diversity to maximise achievements, creativity and good practice. We positively welcome and seek to ensure we achieve diversity in our workforce and that all job applicants and employees receive equal and fair treatment, regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability or nationality.
As a Disability Confident Employer, we are proud, whenever possible, to offer an interview to all candidates that meet our selection criteria, and who indicate they wish their application to be considered under our Disability Confident interview commitment. For more details, visit our careers site.
If you are successful you will need to provide evidence of your right to work in the UK via our digital ID checking supplier; in addition, we cannot offer visa sponsorship at this time.
Every day is different at Guide Dogs. And no person with sight loss is the same. We work side by side, on our sites and in the community, in schools and on our streets, supporting people to live the life they choose. Our staff therefore also work in different ways to support the delivery of our life changing work.
Safeguarding
Guide Dogs is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of all children, young people and adults at risk of harm with whom we work. We expect all our employees and volunteers to fully share this commitment.
At Guide Dogs, we believe in fair and equitable hiring practices. A criminal record will not automatically disqualify an applicant from consideration for a position. Each case will be evaluated individually, taking into account the nature of the offense, its relevance to the role, and the time that has passed since the incident. We encourage all candidates to disclose relevant information, and we assure you that it will be handled confidentially and fairly.
Guide Dogs follow Safer Recruitment practices to ensure we are safeguarding the vulnerable people we work with. As part of this, we require a full work history with any gaps accounted for & a minimum of 2 professional referee details fully covering the past 5 years. If you are applying for a disclosure role, please note that you will be required to undergo an enhanced DBS check and sign up to the DBS update service.
For high volumes of applications, we reserve the right to close adverts earlier than advertised.