Buyer - Food Ingredients (maternity cover)

Louis Dreyfus Company is looking for a Buyer, Food Ingredients to strengthen their EMEA procurement team.

The Buyer role will be responsible for procurement activities to support the production activities in plant operations within the region with an initial focus on Germany. This role involves managing supplier relationships, negotiating contracts, and ensuring the timely delivery of high-quality raw materials to meet production demands.

Main Responsibilities:

• Perform Simple and Tactical sourcing : analyze past purchases, support other departments articulating specifications, analyze suppliers market, prepare and issue Request for Quotations / Proposals, analyze offers, negotiate, select suppliers and contract for various spend categories, under the guidance of more senior procurement colleagues.
• Process Purchase Requests to Purchase Orders : convert Purchase Requests submitted by internal requesters into Purchase Orders towards suppliers based on the appropriate terms and conditions as per contracts negotiated by colleagues or to be negotiated by the buying team under guidance. This shall include managing the required master data (material & services, counterparts) and other underlying processes to enable such PR to PO conversion and act as a key users to end users for systems involved (SAP, Ariba, EBX). Such POs may be intercompany.
• Follow up and expedite Purchase Orders : ensure the delivery in time, quality and quantity of the various goods and services ordered which includes, for critical supplies, tracking PO confirmations and shipping notification. A specific attention shall be given to the purchases critical to the plant operations. This shall include some intercompany transactions and physical flows.
• Monitor Buying Chanel compliance : make sure the negotiated contracts / catalogs and T&Cs of such contracts are properly used by LDC on the plants. Monitor any deviation, suggest and implement remediation plans once approved, and report to more senior colleagues appropriately.
• Resolve Purchase Order related issues and support claims management : proactively support any type of issue in conjunction with the purchases in scope. This shall include all natures of claims related to any of the steps of the process, including but not limited to deliveries and invoicing.

In addition, the Buyer will play a key role for Source to Contract and Purchase to Pay processes proper implementation and governance and as part of this role will act as a key user for LDC systems supporting such processes towards the various roles involved in the process on the Wittenberg plant (Requesters, Approvers, Account Payable clerks).

Such systems include SAP S/4Hana (MM), Ariba (SLP, Sourcing, Network) and EBX. LDC will provide initial and ongoing training for the Buyer to master those systems as a (key) user.

As part of the role and within the EMEA procurement team, the Buyer might be required to perform similar activities for other categories and countries / assets within the region or other procurement activities (strategic sourcing or procurement excellence – process & system- related work).