Contract Specialist - natl Sales (hybrid Role: Onsite And Virtual)

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This primary purpose of this role is to perform management support for customer contracts within National Sales. This includes renewals of existing agreements, ensuring proper construction and execution/implementation of customer contracts. This role is segmented as Hybrid. You will be onsite in Rosemont, IL 3 days a week (Tuesday - Thursday) and Virtual Monday and Friday.

Major Responsibilities

• Liaise with the Category Management Team, Vendor Partners, Divisions, Vendor Administration, National Contracts Administration and National SIS to assure overall integrity of the contracts.
• Solicits and verifies current product pricing from Category Management Team in order to perform basic analysis to determine customer-specific pricing (for the designated agreement term).
• Solicits and verifies vendor support, as necessary.
• Ensures contract creation, review, approval, and execution take place per SOP's, ensuring the contract process runs in an accurate, efficient, and timely manner.
• Performs analysis for a large volume of contract renewals and audits each month (averages 100-200 renewals per month, could be several hundred items in various categories).
• Audits all renewals to verify items were correctly implemented in the system.
• Submits all audit forms as documentation of the audit within SOP's.
• Alerts central processing center of any discrepancies and ensures they are corrected.
• Be responsible for contract activities involved in vendor status changes, and product assortment – or detail – changes.
• Revise customer contracts accordingly, and as appropriate.
• Plans and carries out recurring work using established procedures, conferring with the supervisor or higher-level analysts as necessary on technical problems or concerns.
• Maintains official contract file for each customer and prepares routine letters and other documents associated with contract administration in an organized and consistent manner.
• Processes contract modifications, including obtaining and evaluating customer proposals, participating in and documenting negotiations, preparing and inputting modifications, and generating all associated documents for approval.

Relationships

• Internal: Works closely with Category Management, Processing Center Support, Legal and across all levels of Corporate and Division personnel.
• External: Works closely with vendor partners and national customers to ensure contract compliance.

Qualifications

• Education / Training: High School Diploma required. Bachelor's Degree preferred.
• Related Experience: 3 years of experience in any of the following fields: accounting, business, finance, law, contracts, purchasing, economics, industrial management, supply management, quantitative methods, marketing or management. Experience in a foodservice/distribution setting a plus. The ideal candidate will have experience working within a supply chain operation and familiarity with basic procurement processes (including understanding product and logistic cost structural factors).
• Knowledge / Skills / Abilities: Must demonstrate a high degree of effective written and verbal communication, high attention to detail. Must possess excellent organizational skills and be able to take the initiative. Must be proficient in Microsoft Excel – including experience utilizing excel functions such as vlookups and pivot tables - Word and Outlook, and be familiar with PowerPoint and Access. Ability to work independently. Exceptional candidates will have complete life cycle experience working with contracts and supporting vendors, suppliers and category management.

Physical Requirements: Able to sit and stand for long periods of time.

This role will also receive annual incentive plan bonus. Benefits for this role may include health insurance, pre-tax spending accounts, retirement benefits, paid time off, short-term and long-term disability, employee stock purchase plan, and life insurance.