Meet The Team – Procurement Manager

This is the first in our series of meet the team blog posts. We will be highlighting the unsung heroes of our business to allow you a little insight into the hard work that goes on behind the scenes to ensure we produce only the best results for our clients. We begin with a very important role within the company, Procurement Manager, a position that demands a range of professional qualities to ensure we keep costs down and quality high. To tell us more, we interviewed Anna Sankowska, Jonckers Procurement Manager.

How long have you been at Jonckers?

I’ve been at Jonckers for two years now.

Can you please describe your role and responsibilities…

As Procurement Manager at Jonckers, I am responsible for the coordination of the Procurement Team. I evaluate Jonckers’ subcontracting capacity in order to keep it aligned with the clients actual production needs, define purchasing strategies and obtain the best possible subcontracting rates on the market.

Some of my Key Responsibilities:
• Manage the Procurement team and act as escalation point for all procurement related issues
• Develop the supplier pool to align it to the company’s needs
• Drive complex negotiations and provide negotiations support to the Procurement Team
• Supplier selection, performance tracking and evaluation
• Drive and implement service level agreements (SLA), master agreements (MA) and other contracts

In that time what have you seen change in the industry?

I have been in the localisation industry for over 10 years now and can seen first hand many developments and changes and how we are now heading towards a more diverse service requirement from our clients. Localisation business is not just about translation and revisions anymore. We now offer much more in the form of voice over services, language leading outsourcing, transcreation and SEO, as well as transcription and subtitling. This means Clients are now looking for more complex solutions that LSPs (Language Service Providers) can offer, ideally if these can be obtained from one and the same partner, then it is better for our clients. Of course we should not forget about MTPE (Machine Translation Post Editing) services that have become increasingly more popular over the last few years. This changes the profile of the linguists in the market – in order to be more competitive translators and revisers are now listing post-editing in their portfolios.

What do you feel are the biggest challenges facing Procurement Teams in todays market?

People have always been our greatest asset and finding the right talents in the market is one of our main challenges. Active recruitment through all possible social media is currently an everyday task, given that the services we provide are so diverse, we spend a lot of hours sourcing and filtering to find the best candidates. Also speed is key, the more and more competitive the market becomes, the faster we must act to meet our customers needs, we have to react quickly and still maintain that professional quality. One such example is the outsourcing of the language leading services. Here the clients expect highly experienced SMEs who are available on a temporary contract-basis for a fixed number of hours a month and who are located in a certain country or even city. This is a challenge but still something we have been successfully providing and continue to do so at a very high standard.