Main Questions Flashcards
Please describe your professional experience and tell me more about yourself.
I’m from Curitiba and I’ve lived in São Paulo for 13 years. I studied Food Engineering and my interest in Procurement arose during my first job at Symrise. That led me to becoming a Procurement Analyst at Agrega.
There, I dove into Strategic Sourcing and e-Sourcing tools to leverage the negotiations outcomes and handled some indirect categories.
Then, I got an amazing opportunity to join BAT, where I spent about 4 years. In my first year, I negotiated raw materials and packaging for NPI projects, like cigarette paper, folding cartons and mock-ups. Year 2, I stepped up and led a team in the tactical cell negotiating low spend demands, saving up GBP 2M in that year. After that, I scored a promotion to Specialist and moved to the strategic facilities category, when I dove into transformation projects.
In 2018, at Danuri, I led the Supply Chain area coordinating the operational processes and set up OTB to boost the sales accuracy.
Then, I came back to the Procurement world as Coordinator at GTM. It was exciting because I built the area from scratch, put together the team, guided them, crafted policies and procedures, and set up KPIs.
Today I’m a Category Manager for forniture at Tok&Stok and I’m eyeing the next step. I want to level up by doing category management on a regional scale.
All these experiences have molded me into a versatile professional, helped me to enhance my leadership and management skills, preparing me for new challenges.
What are your greatest strengths?
I’ve noticed that my real strengths lie in staying focused and being results oriented, maintaining control of KPIs. And, when it comes to diving into a category, I really go deep to find opportunities and innovation. It’s just how I work.
Tell me more about your weaknesses.
I’m more of a reserved person, not so much the outgoing type. I guess it’s related to my commitment with my tasks and deadlines, but it can hold me back from building stronger connections at work.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Looking ahead, my goal is to become a senior manager. Now I have the required skills and I plan to keep building them up and applying them in the Procurement area.
Why are you the best candidate for us? / Why do you want this job? / Why are you leaving your current position? / Is there anything that could be improved in your current job?
My job at TokStok gave me a solid dive into category management, but now I’m ready to level up. I’m aiming for a regional role to keep developing these competences and this position feels like the perfect chance to transition and tackle new challenges I didn’t have in my previous jobs.
How would you describe yourself?
In my personal life and working in groups, I’m collaborative and people encouraging. Also, I like to plan and focus on the objectives that I want to achieve. I like to work in transformation projects with people who think different from me making me update my mindset constantly and bringing new solutions.
Tell me about a situation where you had to make a difficult decision. / Describe a difficult problem you solved.
At Caldic, the Sales team scored a deal to supply a chemical product, and sent me the demand to develop the product’s packaging.
So, I started a strategic sourcing process with packaging companies, but the result exceeded our budget .
With this, I engaged Finantial and Controlling areas to seek for saving opportunities. In a teamwork, we found a 7% savings possibility outsourcing packaging production, scoring better deals on resin and mold, and reducing taxes and tributes in the hole process.
In that meantime, I had to reorganize my tasks and delegate other urgent stuff to my team to be able to run urgently the sourcing processes for the service of packaging production, resin and mold supply and delivered the results within the deadline. In this project, we captured commercial, tax and operational savings.
Tell me about a time you had to give someone difficult feedback
I asked one analyst of my team to create procedures regarding requisition and order creations. When I checked out the work, I realized that substantial improvement was necessary to share it with other areas.
I told her that I valued her effort and offered some orientations about the revision. But, she wasn’t quite prepared for constructive feedback and didn’t take it too well. The situation required empathy and communication skills.
By the end of this process, the documents were well done and we got many positive feedbacks from other areas. This experience also gave me a chance to get closer to her and build a solid, trustworthy relationship.
Tell me about a time you missed a deadline.
At BAT, I was in charge of buying direct materials. There was an incident involving a packaging supplier (Siegwerk - Germany) who informed me an issue on the import process.
The order was critical for an innovation project, so a delay would have caused significant setback.
Quickly, I reached out to a local supplier (Carton Druck) and shared the situation. They confirmed that they could reduce the delay delivering the order. I checked my boss and she gave me green light. So, I placed an order with this supplier requesting urgent samples. The samples were approved and the local supplier delivered the order with just one week of delay. After this situation, all new product implementation were developed with both suppliers to guarantee the projects’ deadlines and contingency.
Tell me about a time you had to complete a task you had never done before / considerably exceeded expectations.
At Caldic, I had the initiative to elaborate the Procurement Policy. I started by doing benchmark with other companies, prepared the document and shared it with my boss. This brought a chance to discuss some important and strategic topics, like the threshold between what can be negotiated by the client area and what must be handled by Procurement team.
It was a great opportunity to increase communication and relationship skills and mainly strategic vision. I think also that this situation forced me to go out of my comfort zone, working on something completely new to me and bringing continuous improvement to the company.
Tell me about a time you successfully demonstrated your analytical skills.
When I joined Caldic, we needed to build up the Procurement area with a strategic view. Back then, the team was focused on tactical purchases, decentralized and without experience on strategic sourcing and category management.
As the new coordinator, I requested formal training for the team on these skills and dove into the area’s data. I considered the purchases done in the previous year, organized them into categories, focused on number of purchase orders, spend and suppliers. Then, I proposed a new structure for the team organized by category and, with my manager approval, provided on-the-job training to each analyst to prepare them to use strategic sourcing and to manage the indirect categories.
What steps do you take to develop strong working relationships with key suppliers?
The more strategic a supplier is, the closer the management must be. Ideally, we should have a contingency plan in any case, but sometimes it’s not possible. With key suppliers, I conduct frequent assessments, meetings and visits to ensure the partnership and the deliveries. During negotiations, usually it’s necessary to have some flexibility to achieve a win-win agreement to garantee a sustainable partnership.
Can you detail a negotiation that you had that was unsuccessful? What did you learn from it?
I realized that I’ve made a mistake when I started a negotiation with a different scope than what the client area was expecting. This mistake generated extra time in the whole process and I had to run the negotiation urgently to mitigate the delay. After this situation, I always double-check technical proposals with the client area before I start the negotiation and train my team to do the same as a procedure.
Describe how risk management works.
Risk management in the Procurement area is a critical piece of the puzzle. We have to foresee potential issues and implement strategies to tackle them. We’re talking about Supplier-related Risks, like delays, quality problems or sudden price hikes; and Market Risks, like supply chain disruptions or changes in regulations.
Our goal is to be proactive, building contingency plans, by analysing data, planning next steps and having strong relationships with suppliers.
Requirements
I studied food engineering and have 10 years of experience in Procurement.
I’m all about diving into category and taking opportunities of saving and innovation in partnership with stakeholders.
I’m used to work in fast-paced environments and to deliver short term solutions considering long term impact with sustainable agreements.
As an example, I can mention a situation where I couldn’t meet the budget in the sourcing process and engaged Financial and Controlling areas to develop financial analisys and make or buy simulations to deliver commercial, tax and operational savings. It was my first tolling project where I learned a lot with other areas and delivered a transformation to the business.
I also have experience on leading people from my previous jobs. As I trained on the job this skill, I feel that formal training and participating of a mentoring program would enhance my knowledge in this competence.
