Manager - Contract Manufacturing - Remote

At Eagle Foods we are builders.  We are builders of brands, categories, and people.  Eagle Foods enjoys a rich heritage with brands that have proven category leadership for more than 150 years.  Eagle is a diversified food company producing and marketing sweetened condensed and evaporated milk, snacks and convenient meal solutions products.  As a company, Eagle Foods is passionate about fostering an entrepreneurial spirit that boldly builds better people and better brands while focusing on the positive impact our company, our products and our people have on the world.  Eagle Foods has a bold family of brands that consumers have come to rely on for decades, including Eagle Brand® Sweetened Condensed Milk and Evaporated Milk, Magnolia® Sweetened Condensed Milk, PET® Milk, Popcorn Indiana, Cretors Popcorn, Helper and Suddenly Salad.  Eagle Foods products are marketed and distributed across all U.S. retail channels, including grocery stores, club stores and mass-merchandisers, as well as foodservice and export, U.S. military, and private label business.

Job Description Summary

Responsible for sourcing, selection, contracting, integration & start up coordination, KPI development, performance monitoring, management of innovation, change and continuous improvement at external manufacturing partners.

The planning team is responsible for planning, scheduling and all day-to-day transactional activity once a co man is operational, not this position.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain a database of all potential contract manufacturers/re-packers in current product categories and key focus/development areas for Eagle. This includes understanding capabilities, capacity availability, and plans on how additional capacity if required can be secured. Attend annual events and shows like the Private Label Manufacturing Association events to keep potential partner contacts up to date.
• Interact with R&D and marketing and the PMR process to understand product development pipeline activities and how they will impact the contract manufacturing supply chain. Engage in all projects at the appropriate time to ensure Eagle’s interests and objectives will be met. Often times engagement is early on in the innovation process with R&D, quality and engineering personnel.
• Source manufacturing & re-pack partners in support of new product development projects that are not able to be produced/re-packed in Eagle owned manufacturing facilities.
• Run RFP’s and lead the supplier selection process with the input/involvement of other functional resources.
• Develop supply agreements that secure required capacity and meet quality, cost, service, liability and risk, and supply assurance needs at Eagle.
• Act as project manager over the multifunctional project team responsible for the integration and start-up of external manufacturing/re-pack partners. Upon start up and integration completion, transfer primary transactional ownership to the planning and scheduling teams.
• Lead change projects at existing contract manufacturing & re-pack partners in support of innovation and/or cost savings projects.
• Establish and participate in regular cadence KPI reviews with external manufacturing & re-pack partners to ensure contractual objectives are met. Responsible for continuous evaluation of supplier performance for regulatory compliance, product quality and supply continuity.
• Act as second level support for the planning team if they encounter performance issues with contract manufacturing partners. Partner to solve production capacity issues that are identified in the external manufacturing supply chain.
• Work with planning teams to review forward production requirements and assure that the forward requirement outlook is issued to all contract manufacturers/re-packers in accordance with supply agreements.
• Develop the annual budget and standards and quarterly reforecasts in partnership with finance for all contract manufacturers/re-packers
• Responsible for budget adherence/performance and investing variances incurred within the Contract Manufacturing group.
• Where relationship with partners is ‘directed buy’, ensure raw/pack buyers and supply chains are set up by the Eagle procurement team to support the going business.

Qualifications and Competencies

• College Degree – Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering or supply chain/logistics preferred.
• 7+ years of procurement or external manufacturing experience
• Experience on both tactical buying but also strategic sourcing and supplier relationship management
• Experience leveraging supplier capabilities to support innovation
• Operational knowledge of manufacturing including basic aptitude in the areas of quality, capacity, manufacturing cycles, and inventory management.
• Experience building an annual budget and managing cost vs. budget
• Proficient in Microsoft Office, specifically strong in Excel.
• Consumer products experience preferred.

Critical Skills & Attributes and Other Requirements:

• Travel: must be able travel to visit co man facilities as needed, typically short trips, with an average of 3 trips per month, potentially more during heavy project periods.
• Sourcing and negotiation skills
• Dispute resolution skills – an ability to get in the middle of a situation and leverage facts and data vs emotions to come to a reasonable outcome
• Data and Analytics – experience personally building dashboards to regularly assess operational performance and identify loss recovery opportunities. Strong desire to manage thru metrics and data.
• Business Acumen – ability to interact with potential co man partners and discuss quality systems, capability, capacity, production cycle, costs and logistics including inventory management.
• Innovative – an out of the box thinker who strives for excellence.
• Act with Intensity – must be urgent and positively engage others, be visible and confident.
• Display Influence – able to lead others that do not directly report to you to positive outcomes for the business
• Continuous Improvement – never satisfied with the status quo. Always seeking to identify and drive further opportunity for improvement.