The Sr. Category Manager is responsible for defining the category vision, developing the product portfolio and supplier roadmap, while working closely with sales, marketing, and support functions to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met. The Sr. Category Manager's responsibilities include ensuring that the category strategy supports the company's overall vision, strategy, and goals. The Sr. Category Manager will lead cross-functional collaboration to plan and execute category initiatives from ideation to end-of-life. The category manager facilitates the product requirements gathering and manages the strategic sourcing process to ensure successful alignment of products/brands to bring the category vision and positioning to life. This position requires a multi-departmental interface to marketing, sales, customer service, branch operations, manufacturing and procurement. Key functional requirements will be to capture, process and utilize industry trend information to develop demand models in extrapolating potential and projected sales, lead the product family and/or corporate-wide Commercialization process, chair the Product Review Meeting as part of the Sales & Operations Planning process, manage key Sales & Marketing performance indicators including sales funnel measures, commercialization stage gate metrics, project delivery statistics, and participate actively in the overall Sales & Operations Planning process.
Duties and Responsibilities
Conduct market assessments, including 5 forces analyses to evaluate category dynamics.
Develop competitor SWOT analyses to evaluate and understand current threats.
Own the defined Myers Distribution positioning/role in the specified category market.
Establish a 3 to 5-year category strategy to defend and grow the Myers Distribution position.
Assess competitive landscape to determine critical product offering gaps or portfolio evolution requirements.
Create the product strategy and roadmap.
Work with subject matter experts to scope, design, test and deliver product solutions.
Lead cross-functional collaboration to plan and execute product initiatives, bridging technical and business teams.
Align business units on product portfolio changes and the effect on demand.
Assess product growth goals and strategies, maximizing growth rates and returns.
Lead periodical product portfolio reviews (ABCxyz and profitability analyses) to determine SKU rationalization.
Help with sales, sales operations, customer service and operations to review and refine customer service policies consistent with market expectation and business capabilities.
Crate and maintain the by-SKU Product Lifecycle Management plan (Phase-In/Phase-Out plan).
Recommend demand shaping actions in response to market conditions and customer demand changes.
Participate with finance and commercial team in determining appropriate price list(s) and pricing deviations.
Create category-based supplier assessment(s) to determine partnerships & positioning alignment.
Develop a category-based sourcing strategy that results in identifying key suppliers with whom to align.
Lead category-based sourcing activities such that effective plans are created that can be used for procurement, inventory planning, distribution planning and capacity (space) planning.
Establish, review, and maintain an 18-month by-category sourcing plan that balances service requirements, working capital constraints, and category strategic needs.
Competitively bid and negotiate supplier contracts, as appropriate, for product sets that enable the site to meet customer expectations and margin contribution commitments.
Develop supplier relationships, establishing product, quality, and cost roadmaps.
Conduct supplier evaluations to measure performance and define areas of improvement.
Conduct market research to keep abreast of emerging trends and business opportunities.
Ensure continuous improvement of key processes and implementation of best practices in product management.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
Ten to fifteen years of experience with automotive or highly effective distribution organization.
Understand automotive product lines and how those products go to market.
Proven track record of developing distribution categories with multi-disciplinary consideration
Proficiency with Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
