Director, Should Costing

At Konecranes, we believe that great customer experience is built on the people behind the Konecranes name – people committed to providing our customers with lifting equipment and services that lift their businesses. Everything we do, we do with passion and drive. We believe diversity drives business success and is the foundation for our growth. We welcome different backgrounds and skills that enrich our community, and we promote a place where we can all be ourselves. This is what makes Konecranes a unique place to work

We are looking for a well collaborating procurement professional to lead the Should Costing and Value Analysis (VA) & Value Engineering (VE) team and to drive development of related practises and processes further. In this role you need to have excellent substance know-how, industrial experiences in similar role, and compliance together with people leadership and management skills. You are proactive and understand business needs, international supply market and related opportunities. You lead by example, communicate well and you collaborate with all relevant internal and external stakeholders to get priorities set, aligned and implemented with transparency and financial incorporation.

You will be responsible for working cross-functionally with senior business and procurement leaders across Konecranes’ in international environment to leverage your skills and organization to create insights and ideas for product and components costs improvements and redesigning, to feed funnel of technical costs savings (for supplier negotiators and technical departments) and to implement this activity to downstream and upstream processes and collaboration methods to realize total reduced cost.

You will report to the CPO, Konecranes and would be part of Procurement Leadership Team. The location of the position will in one of the Konecranes offices in India.

Your key responsibilities:

• Conceptualize should costing, Va/Ve and create a roadmap to reach the point of arrival in optimizing the total reduced cost and increased value chain.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate cost with low Carbon footprint, train related to procurement organization and to support delivering sustainable procurement targets aligned with businesses. 
• Create and maintain value engineering & cost down related roadmaps.
• Define practices, toolbox, related sub-strategy and development/deployment roadmap for function - likewise related policies, processes and work procedures.
• Support businesses with product cost optimization and tear downs efforts.
• Operationalizing decarbonization & circularity strategies for ESG into selected category strategies and consistently support individuals in supplier interface to deliver results.
• Proactively identify additional cost savings opportunities and feed savings funnel
• Establish performance management to monitor technical cost savings funnel especially for high priority products to achieve the set cost reduction targets.
• Find design related root causes for insufficient suppliers’ production performance and find out way to reduce costs of expected quality in supply chain
• Establish framework of competency development for the team
• Support different teams and leaders to prioritize best value adding with lowest effort activities among alternatives without diminishing the effectiveness of product or the quality of customer satisfaction.
• Contribute and support the global cost reduction activities related to existing products and cost avoidance in new product development.
• Contributing the value improvement ideas towards implementing best cost alternatives or countries in manufacturing process, designs, locations and so on.
• Support team in action with systematic product tear down analysis, benchmarking, evaluation, technical feasibility and qualification of selected and identified opportunities ready for further verification and implementation
• Build up related knowledge data base (e.g., supplier specific profiles etc.)
• Support make or buy analysis by working closely with Category managers/supplier managers and/or related leaders in businesses
• Awareness of ISO 14001 & 45001 Standards

What should you bring?

• Master’s degree with 12+ years of professional experience in international environment in Procurement where you have worked/deployed extensively in should costing, /VA/VE in industrial or Engineering companies
• Strategic orientation, tactical skills and ability to understand both the big picture and needed details.
• Persuasive communication skills, English language fluency and ability to listen to what is required from stakeholders and employees.
• Ability to identify and deliver quick wins to gain trust while conceptualizing.
• Courage to challenge and support constructively at all levels in the group.
• Ability to understand different processes and systems together, plan for step changes in this environment while driving with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Good working knowledge of related tools, systems and database interfaces.
• Experience of working collaboratively across borders and delivering operations outcomes in a range of countries in a global and matrix reporting environment.
• You can differentiate yourself if you have also experience of business system, LEAN Hoshin Kanri, deploying AI for should costing or leading procurement transformation in international industrial playground.
• This role requires business travel on international scale, the percentage is subject for agreement.

What we offer for you

In return, we can offer you an exciting and challenging position with excellent learning opportunities, in our positive, flexible, and international working environment with great colleagues. You will get to work in an international business environment with many opportunities for personal growth and development. You will have the opportunity to be part of global procurement organization and chance to contribute to the success of Konecranes.

In this position you would report to Chief Procurement Officer, Konecranes.

Please submit your application by 16.01.2025, at the latest. When applying please ensure that please ensure you send your application via Konecranes careers page. Due to GDPR regulations, we cannot accept applications via email. Please be aware that we will begin conducting interviews during the application process.  

For additional information about the role, please contact the team lead, Kimmo Kemppinen, Chief Procurement Officer, Konecranes, at kimmo.kemppinen (at) konecranes.com.
For any recruitment process-related questions, please reach out to Kirsi Hannula, People and Culture Manager for the Group via kirsi.hannula (at) konecranes.com.

Konecranes moves what matters. We are a global leader in material handling solutions, serving a broad range of customers across multiple industries. We consistently set the industry benchmark, from everyday improvements to the breakthroughs at moments that matter most, because we know we can always find a safer, more productive and sustainable way. That's why, with 16 000+ professionals in over 50 countries, we are trusted every day to lift, handle and move what the world needs.

Konecranes is committed to ensuring that all employees and job applicants are treated fairly in an environment which is free from any form of discrimination.