Category Manager

Category Manager - IT

Salary: £53k – £66k Location: Portsmouth Employment Type: Permanent 

Role Overview

• A strategic and forward-thinking professional is sought to join the Procurement function, taking ownership of IT Category Management. You will lead and deliver end-to-end category plans designed to maximise value, drive innovation, and minimise commercial risk.
• Managing a portfolio of IT suppliers, you will champion continuous improvement and ensure value is delivered throughout the entire contract lifecycle. Your expertise in IT categories, combined with strong market insight, will help shape sourcing strategies and guide internal stakeholders.
• In this key position, you will lead tendering activities, negotiations, and sourcing initiatives, ensuring regulatory compliance while influencing how IT services are delivered across the organisation.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive the development and continuous improvement of procurement best practices across the full lifecycle, ensuring processes remain effective and up to date.
• Build trusted relationships with internal stakeholders and external suppliers, with the ability to influence senior leaders.
• Deliver exceptional customer service through clear, proactive communication with both internal teams and external partners.
• Encourage innovation and continuous improvement across procurement procedures to enhance service efficiency and outcomes.
• Manage IT category spend, ensuring alignment with organisational goals and risk-management strategies.
• Develop and implement category and demand strategies by engaging stakeholders to understand future needs and specifications.
• Lead commercial activities across the sourcing lifecycle, driving value creation and reducing total cost of ownership.
• Collaborate with business leaders to achieve cost savings through standardisation, aggregation and reduction of tail-spend.
• Ensure full compliance with regulated procurement requirements, statutory obligations, and data-protection standards.
• Embed organisational values relating to health, safety, and wellbeing within sourcing strategies and supplier qualification processes.

Skills, Qualifications & Competencies

Essential

• Strong ability to analyse and communicate complex commercial and contractual information to a wide stakeholder group.
• Excellent organisational skills and confidence managing multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Strong negotiation, influencing, and issue-resolution skills.
• Outstanding communication abilities, with a customer-focused mindset and effective stakeholder-engagement skills.
• Self-motivated, resilient and proactive.
• Knowledge of the water industry and/or IT-specific supply chains.
• Experience of strategic sourcing in a multi-stakeholder setting and working within multi-disciplinary teams.
• Relevant transferable supply-chain knowledge.
• Proven track record of delivering against challenging targets.

Desirable

• Strong commercial and contractual acumen.
• Understanding and experience of regulated procurement procedures (UCR, PCR, or PA23).
• CIPS/MCIPS or equivalent professional qualifications.
• Project-management experience or formal accreditation.

Benefits

• 27 days of annual leave, plus bank holidays.
• Generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 15%.
• Enhanced family leave.
• Life assurance.
• Comprehensive wellbeing services.
• Private Medical Insurance.

For more information contact the Reed Southampton office or apply now!