Material Engineer - Leather

Key Purpose and Spirit of Position:
Act as primary material contact and stay on top of material issue/communication of located country and assigned material categories, with focus on material development/innovation. Ensuring material integrity and driving all related material development activity through to production.
Driving innovation, performance and value for assigned material categories and T2 following category product and material strategies. Encourage collaboration across categories, suppliers and along the entire supply chain to intensify progress and communication
Monitor leather usage with optimize leather co-efficiency across Asia region. Collaborate with relevant party to establish material cutting best practice and agree usage%. Manage the material function within the located country from development to bulk.
In broad terms the jobholder will need to do the following in order to be successful:
Responsibilities
Material Sourcing/development
• Act as the primary resource to UK material team for leather sourcing, negotiation and approval;
• Monitor and assure seasonable leather development to meet requirement and pass customer test;
• Keep up with innovation and new technology on leather industry and identity opportunity on innovation or provide some type of strategic advantage. i. e. sustainable, point of difference, costing advantage, sourcing advantage, material trend advantage, etc.
Material Engineering
• Involve deeply in leather supply chain to T2/T3/T4, work with vendor and relevant team to set up leather spec and quality window based on the character and limitation for difference type of leather.
• Review leather coefficient and set up acceptable cutting tolerance during material development stage;
• Establish leather cutting best practise and drive to implement across the region. Provide education to internal team or factory cutting room;
• Monitor leather coefficient and factory cutting room performance, ensure meet brand standard;
Material Management
• Be the first material contact window in located country for material communication and issue solving.
• Manage material in located country collaborate with Pentland local team and T1 and T2 to ensure consistency quality and delivery;
• Seamless transfer from material development to material production, Pro-actively work on material risk assessment/management and provide countermeasure from material specialist perspective;
T2 Supply Chain Management
• Establishes a strong rapport and knowledge of assigned material vendor gauging their strengths and weakness with regards to development, service, quality, capacity, delivery and costs.
• Implement appropriate performance evaluation/T2 KPI to optimize supply chain and identify opportunity to improve;
• Build and maintain a strong business relationship with vendors in located country;
• Communicate Pentland social and environmental policy and requirement to vendors, implement RSL management program and across material supply chain;