About this role

As a Portfolio Manager - Fibre, Cable & Connectivity, you’ll be critical to helping Openreach achieve its strategic goals. 

You’ll be ensuring that our operational colleagues across Openreach have the stores and fibre cable they need to allow them to build and provision our fibre to the premises (FTTP) network and to deliver on our service commitments on repair.

You will support one of Openreach’s toughest challenges in sourcing the right stock, to the right place at the right time and cost to ensure we are maintaining our provision of high-quality customer service that will in turn strengthen our brand and position in the market.  

You’ll be a subject matter expert on Demand, Supply and Inventory Planning working across all functions to ensure a comprehensive portfolio strategy is in place. You will contribute to policy discussion and developments, formulation of business plans, setting standards and procedures, and make key inputs to their areas of accountability across Openreach’s supply chain demand and supply function, including defining, educating and maintaining standard planning processes across the team.

This role will manage a diverse range of suppliers whose ability to understand Openreach’s requirements and fulfil their supply commitments against those are pivotal to the success of our strategy. You will need to develop close working relationships with these suppliers to understand their manufacturing capacities and fulfilment capabilities and help drive those forward in order to meet our increasing volume requirements. You will also need to be able to robustly manage supplier under performance and drive supplier performance improvement plans in collaboration with Partner Management and Procurement when required.

You’ll lead cross-functional inventory management and operational initiatives. Identify process and systems gaps and identify opportunities for process improvements and project manage through to implementation by partnering with technology, operations, planning, and procurement teams to align them to drive business results.

You'll have the following responsibilities

• Define and deliver an annual portfolio plan aligned to Openreach’s strategic objectives on customer service and working capital management

• Implement a clear and auditable governance structure

• Generate demand plans & system forecasts based on clear approved business inputs on BAU demands, product introductions & withdrawals as well as project specific demands for items within the portfolio

• End to end lifecycle management of the Openreach FTTP Stores & Fibre portfolio, to help ensure the right stock is in the right place at the right time, and at the right cost, for BAU demand relating to FTTP Build and Provision as well as project initiatives.

• Work collaboratively building a virtual team across Finance, Chief Engineer, Operations, Procurement and Shared Services

• Identify risks and manage mitigations

• Lead the collection, collation, analysis and presentation of information to senior management, on behalf of the whole organisation, or for a particular function, division or region. 

• Lead external / internal benchmarking activities in support of improvement initiatives to drive efficiency

• Support on the analysis and tracking of budget/forecast to ensure that Central Finance and Supply Chain have the relevant information and tools in place to manage the Openreach’s stores requirement to avoid stock outs of critical items and unnecessary stock holdings.

• Continually improve stores forecasting and ordering process for the portfolio – liaising with business forecasting leads to ensure process is fit for purpose

• Challenge costs and highlight/track cost saving opportunities and liaise on Efficiency Enablers and tracking

• Define and deploy inventory strategies for the assigned product portfolio that provide the desired customer service levels while optimising working capital

• Generate Supply plans based on inventory budgets and supplier capacities/constraints

• Order management activities of subsequent supply plans execution

• Manage Supplier performance and drive supplier performance improvement plans in collaboration with Partner Management and Procurement when required

You'll have the following skills & experience

• Expert in Demand & Supply Planning 

• Great depth of competency in inventory strategies and management

• Aptitude for mental agility and innovation, and significant analytical capability

• A seasoned supplier relationship and performance manger

• Excellent presentation skills with experience of presenting to Senior Management 

• Gravitas to engage with senior stakeholders and be recognised as a subject matter expert for the portfolio items

• Leading and developing people

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with great attention to detail

• Customer focus & stakeholder management

• Proficient in conflict management 

• Experience of managing change programmes in a fast-paced environment including cultural, system, process and people impact