What is the role?

Reporting to a Senior Procurement Professional, who in turn reports to the Procurement Manager.

These are exciting times for public services, infrastructure and regeneration in Portsmouth. Major investment is delivering a wealth of improvements to the city that will help facilitate greater economic prosperity for its residents. In addition against a wider agenda of reducing budgets there is a clear focus on spending less and getting more value for public money.

At Portsmouth City Council there will be plenty of opportunities for you to demonstrate and develop your Procurement expertise in the Central Procurement department. The Central Procurement department advises across all areas of the organisation from Social Care, Transport to ICT. As such this is a great opportunity for you to develop and widen your market experience.

This role requires you to act as a Category Business Partner, as part of the Council's Category Management approach, to support a particular category of procurement activity. In your role you will advise customer departments on how to map their spend and spot opportunities for strategic sourcing to deliver savings.

You will act as the Procurement lead officer on major procurement projects. You will also assist customers' progress their projects through the Procurement Gateway process which underpins the Corporate Procurement infrastructure. In addition you will provide customers with guidance on how to manage their contracts once they have been let.

We're looking for a talented professional with experience who is able to work and advise customers at a senior management level. It's important that you have high level commercial awareness with sound understanding of EU procurement regulations along with proven experience of satisfying customers and delivering savings.

Who is the person?

You need to:

1. Be qualified to MCIPS (Chartered Institute of Purchasing & Supply Professional member) or equivalent experience and/or qualifications.

2. Have experience in a variety of contract management activities.

3. Have knowledge of EU procurement legislation and procedure.

4. Have procurement experience over a variety of procurement activities.

5. Have the ability to display leadership and professional advice to technical colleagues.

6. Be a good communicator with strong interpersonal skills.

7. Have good IT skills as you will be using the Microsoft Office Suite, Oracle and the Intend System.

8. Have experience in drafting tender documentation and a knowledge of different approaches to specification formulation

9. Be a proactive, enthusiastic, self-motivated team player with the ability to be flexible and adaptable to provide effective support to the team.

Closing time/date, 12:00 noon, on the 14th November 2014. Applications received after this may not be considered. Interview process: 25th & 26th November 2014.