Assistant Manager - Project Buyer

Role Overview and Responsibilities

As a vital member of the project team, the Assistant Manager - Project Buyer actively participates in project meetings and leads or supports all purchasing activities throughout the project lifecycle, including tasks such as NPA, PRKF, Sourcing Plan, PSC, PMC, IAR, TOGO, FDPR, ISVA, and SOP, ensuring successful project closure. The role collaborates closely with the Project Manager to prepare the Sourcing Plan, setting mutual commitments and conditions for advancing pre-sourcing RFQs, awards, and start-of-production at required quality, cost, and delivery (QCD) standards.

The assistant manager confirms project team commitments during L2 Planning within the Puma system and selects supplier bid-lists based on compliant segment panels. They engage with Project and Segment organizations to identify bundling opportunities and identify critical parts according to CLEAN definitions, reviewing contingency plans with relevant teams and escalating for arbitration if necessary.

Coordination of Supplier-Validated Request for Feedback (S-VRF) uploads and supplier design reviews ensures suppliers fully understand requirements, submit improvement proposals, and accept Valeo standards. Promoting competition at an equivalent scope is a key part of this process. The role involves extensive use of the Puma platform, encouraging usage among project teams to track sourcing milestones and decisions accurately.

Strategic collaboration with Segment Leaders or Group Segment Directors ensures sourcing strategies align with group objectives. Risk assessments for pre-selected suppliers are conducted, considering development/production capability, technical quality, and financial sustainability, followed by mitigation planning in coordination with the commodity organization. The assistant manager proposes lotting, RFP tactics, and auction use, executing RFQ processes through Puma and auctions.

Anticipation and escalation of project risks, sourcing decisions, and QCD targets to appropriate levels are essential duties. The assistant manager also facilitates timely approvals for successful auction events and ensures continual updates to sourcing milestone data, enabling accurate forecasting for bundling and business link item selection. Coordination with productivity buyers identifies part numbers applicable for business linking before auctions or awards. Leadership of the project purchasing index and productivity action plans aiming to meet Cost Avoidance and Cost Benefits targets are included.

The role guarantees smooth transition to serial production, ensuring outstanding productivity actions are in place and creating early open orders in SAP in partnership with productivity buyers. It fosters proper communication flows and documentation management between project teams and suppliers, which includes contracts, long-term agreements, and business link documentation stored in Puma. Compliance with project milestones related to suppliers and progress of Project Quality Assurance stages are continuously monitored.

For global platforms produced across multiple Valeo plants, the assistant manager coordinates with Platform Project Buyers and other stakeholders to ensure alignment with commodity strategies, receiving plant localization needs, and global supplier base leverage and security from SOP.

Additional Duties for Advanced Purchasing (P3/P2)

• Pre-sourcing target suppliers are proposed and validated in collaboration with the commodity organization.
• All contractual elements are managed meticulously to safeguard Valeo intellectual property and segment panels.