Global Commodity Manager

Company Overview:

Nelson Global engineers, manufactures, and distributes clean and efficient Air & Fluid Transfer, NVH, Complex Structural, Acoustic, and Thermal Management Solutions. Nelson Global partners with the world’s leading OEMs. With 22 global manufacturing and distribution facilities and unparalleled engineering and innovation capabilities, Nelson Global provides mission critical solutions with the highest degree of reliability at the lowest cost. Our dedication to serving our employees, partners, and the planet responsibly is realized across three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social, and governance. By empowering our people, reducing waste, and developing innovative and efficient systems, we support the communities and resources that spur the industries and technologies of the future.

Position Overview:
(This is a remote position with travel to Stoughton, WI and Carmel, IN as needed).

We are looking for a Global Commodity Manager to own the United States supply base and connect it to the rest of our global sourcing organization. You will carry roughly $100 million in annual spend across raw material and engineered commodities, and you will be the person who makes sure a decision taken in North America works for our plants in Europe, Asia and South America too.

This is a role for someone who has spent a career in global sourcing and wants the whole picture: the steel and aluminum markets that set our input costs, the engine, exhaust and NVH programs that consume them, and the fast-growing data center segment where our thermal and acoustic work is finding new demand. You will negotiate real money, but the harder and more interesting part of the job is alignment — building one commercial position with Global and Regional Commodity Managers who each have their own plants, currencies and customer commitments.

You will sit at the center of that conversation. If you like the work of turning several regional positions into one global strategy, and you can hold your own in a steel negotiation, this will suit you.

What You Will Do:

Own the US Supply Base

• Take full commercial ownership of approximately $100 million in annual US spend, including supplier selection, negotiation, contracting, cost management and performance
• Build and maintain multi-year category strategies for your commodities, grounded in market analysis, should-cost modeling, capacity outlook and supplier financial health
• Lead sourcing events end to end — RFI through award — and negotiate long-term agreements covering price, volume flexibility, lead time, tooling, quality and continuity of supply
• Manage raw material price mechanisms and index-based agreements for steel and aluminum, and translate market movement into forecast, budget and customer recovery positions with Finance and Sales
• Run supplier performance against clear measures for quality, delivery, cost, innovation, and responsiveness, and lead corrective action when a supplier misses

Partner Globally

• Work as a peer with Global and Regional Commodity Managers across our seven-country footprint to align strategy, avoid duplicated negotiation and leverage total Nelson volume rather than regional volume
• Identify where a US supplier can serve a plant outside the US — and where a regional supplier is the better answer for a US program — and make the case with data
• Contribute US market intelligence into the global commodity planning cycle and bring the global view back to US stakeholders

Support the Business

• Partner with Engineering, Program Management and Quality from concept through launch, so that sourcing decisions are made early enough to influence design and cost
• Support new business quoting with accurate, defensible material and component cost inputs
• Drive year-over-year cost improvement through resourcing, design-to-cost, VA/VE, logistics optimization and consolidation, and track savings to a hard, finance-agreed baseline
• Manage supply risk actively — single-source exposure, tariffs and trade policy, regional disruption, capacity constraint — and maintain mitigation plans that hold up under pressure

Required Education & Experience:

• A minimum of ten years of global sourcing experience, including direct accountability for supplier negotiation and category strategy across more than one region
• A bachelor’s degree. Supply chain, engineering, business or a related field is typical, though we care more about what you have done than what you studied
• Working knowledge of the steel and aluminum raw material markets, including index mechanisms, mill and service center dynamics, surcharges and how raw material movement flows through a manufactured part
• Commodity experience in engines, exhaust and NVH, with a practical understanding of how these components are designed, validated and manufactured
• Demonstrated results negotiating and managing spend at scale — $100 million or comparable — with savings you can evidence
• The ability to influence without authority across regions, functions and cultures, and the judgement to know when to align and when to escalate
• Willingness to travel domestically and internationally to suppliers and Nelson facilities

Preferred Experience:

• Automotive, commercial vehicle, off-highway, power generation or industrial manufacturing background, ideally in a tiered supply environment
• Experience in utilizing AI analytics to support supply chain continuity
• Exposure to the data center segment and its supply base, demand profile and qualification expectations
• Experience in a matrixed global commodity organization with regional buyers and shared category ownership
• Familiarity with IATF 16949 or equivalent quality systems, APQP and PPAP
• Strong ERP and analytics capability — spend analysis, should-cost modeling, and the ability to build a case from data rather than assertion
• CPSM, CPM or similar professional certification; an advanced degree or MBA
• Additional language capability relevant to our footprint