Manager Sourcing Operations

The Sourcing Manager plays a critical role in delivering adidas’ sourcing strategy by ensuring a reliable, competitive, agile, and sustainable supply base that supports the company’s commercial objectives and growth ambitions.

This position acts as the primary interface between the business, product creation teams, suppliers, and manufacturing partners, driving end-to-end execution across the product lifecycle—from planning and development through production and delivery.

The Sourcing Manager is responsible for translating business requirements into sourcing and manufacturing solutions while balancing speed, cost, quality , sustainability, capacity, and operational efficiency. Through strong cross‑functional collaboration and supplier engagement, the role ensures that products are developed and manufactured to meet consumer expectations, market requirements, and company performance targets.

In addition, the Sourcing Manager contributes to adidas' vision of building the industry's most agile, competitive, digitalized, innovative, and sustainable supply chain by identifying opportunities for continuous improvement, manufacturing excellence, process optimization, and supplier capability enhancement.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead the sourcing execution and manufacturing strategy for assigned product categories, brands, countries, or business units, ensuring alignment with global and regional objectives.
• Act as the key sourcing representative and trusted partner for cross‑functional teams including Planning, Product Development, Production Management, Engineering, Manufacturing Innovation, Costing, Materials Management, Sustainability (SEA), Quality, and Commercial organizations.
• Drive end‑to‑end product commercialization and production readiness by coordinating activities from product creation, sampling, material readiness, capacity planning, and cost negotiations through final production execution.
• Collaborate closely with suppliers and manufacturing partners to ensure capacity availability, production efficiency, quality excellence, and on‑time delivery performance.
• Monitor factory performance, identify operational risks, and implement mitigation plans to ensure business continuity and uninterrupted supply.
• Lead cost optimization initiatives by balancing product value, manufacturing efficiencies, material utilization, and process improvements while maintaining expected quality standards.
• Support strategic supplier development by improving manufacturing capabilities, driving innovation adoption, promoting digitalization initiatives, and enhancing operational excellence.
• Partner with Sustainability (SEA) teams to ensure compliance with adidas standards related to environmental, social, ethical, and worker well‑being requirements.
• Drive transparency and accountability across the supply chain through data analysis, performance tracking, KPI management, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Identify opportunities to improve speed‑to‑market, reduce complexity, increase flexibility, and strengthen responsiveness to changing consumer and market demands.
• Serve as the escalation point for sourcing and manufacturing issues, leading cross‑functional problem‑solving efforts and ensuring timely resolution of business‑critical matters.

POSITION IMPACT

Success in this role directly influences:

• Product availability and market responsiveness.
• Supplier and factory performance.
• Cost competitiveness and profitability.
• Manufacturing efficiency and operational excellence.
• Product quality and consumer satisfaction.
• Sustainability and compliance performance.

Profile & Experience

• Experience in industrial engineering and/or manufacturing.
• 7–8 years of experience in the textile industry, managing production and quality control.
• Industry background: retail, sporting goods, textiles, or textile testing laboratories such as Intertek or Bureau Veritas.
• Advanced English proficiency.
• Willingness to travel approximately 40–50% of the time.
• No people management responsibility (individual contributor role).

The Sourcing Manager combines strategic thinking with strong execution capabilities, influencing decisions across multiple functions while building collaborative partnerships that enable adidas to deliver world‑class products efficiently, responsibly, and at scale.