Commercial Category Director Wound care

The Commercial Category Director Wound care will develop and align a category strategy for Wound care across geographies. As the central go-to-person for this category he/she will integrate market research and drive trend scouting to identify short-, mid- and long-term opportunities and enable new revenue streams via innovation and business development.

As the integrator of activities in category management for Wound care across Europe, he/she will help define ambitious targets and, in close collaboration with the local category management and sales teams, make sure to secure these in the P&L. This includes setting business priorities as well as defining, implementing and tracking growth and margin improvement initiatives.

As a leadership role to the Category council - a cross functional platform with representatives of the local commercial organizations and sourcing – he/she will partner with sourcing to help rationalize the assortment across the geographies based on margin impact.

In this role he/she will establish Wound care as a global category, support the set-up of the newly build governance and shape the category management organization. He/she will align priorities, take trade-off decisions and make portfolio choices based on the value contribution to the category.

Essential for the role is being able to work in a cross functional international matrix environment, converge deviating views to an aligned set of priorities and requirements. This requires excellent stakeholder management skills and a positive can-do mentality. In this role you will be part of the global team and report directly to VP Category Management & Mediq Own Brand.

What are your key accountabilities?

Category strategy and Innovation

• Create a compelling long-term vision and strategy for the category, align with stakeholders and implement in the organization
• Explore new business opportunities and tab into new revenue streams through new business models and innovative ideas
• Identify new product opportunities and develop product access through existing and new supplier relationships
• Responsible for the final decision on product and supplier steering

Market & Competitor research

• Conduct and consolidate data driven analyses to create category insights across the markets, and establish market size and potential
• Provide factual base for category outlook, market trends and competitive situation
• Drive competitor analysis across markets and make evaluation of future risks

Assortment Planning

• Provide commercial perspective on the assortment, volumes, margins and customer requirements to take portfolio decisions
• Support consolidation of portfolio towards higher margin business
• Act as the interface between commercial organization and sourcing / procurement and contribute to sourcing activities and key supplier negotiations
• Manage product master data management (hierarchy, product data and categorization)

Product development

• Design and develop new products, manage the product life cycle and product retirement
• Develop Business cases for new product developments, define implementation plans across clusters and create a roadmap.
• Align with clusters and sourcing about customer and supplier segmentation

Global category/product steering

• Drive yearly financial target setting of sales and profitability targets
• Set business priorities for the category and support the commercial organization (local category management, product management, marketing and sales) to reach these targets
• Guide geographies in the development of the go-to-market and positioning of the product category to maximize customer value
• Select pricing strategy, set pricing objectives and make price analysis

Performance improvement

• Set-up performance management instruments and review category performance together with finance
• Drive key growth and margin improvement initiatives together with a cross-functional team (local category management, product managers, marketing, sales, …) across geographies (Benelux, DACH, Nordics)
• Track implementation, report results and secure P&L impact of initiatives in line with target

Functional skills & Expertise

• Experienced professional, with a strong background in commercial category management
• Detailed knowledge of the full category management process and ability to adapt this process to pragmatically deliver challenging targets across the group is an absolute must
• Ability to develop a category strategy and drive business development
• Performance management capabilities and management of key initiatives
• Expertise in supporting optimizing of category assortment for margin
• Ability to shape an organization and drive implementation of governance in the global organizations
• Experience in buy-for-resale in the medical sector is desired

Personal Skills

• Strong leadership
• Stakeholder management
• Conceptual/strategic skills
• Strong analytical skills
• Result orientation
• Communication and change skills
• Structured, data driven approach
• Hands-on and can-do mentality

Education & Experience

• Masters degree
• More than 5-10 years relevant working experience
• Experience in a mid-size/large multinational
• Deep knowledge of [category] products for use in the healthcare industry
• Working in a matrix organization