Global PMO & Improvement Leader, Taste

Are you passionate about creating clarity, discipline, and alignment across a complex global transformation portfolio?

Global PMO Manager, Operational Excellence

 

IFF is a global leader in flavors, fragrances, food ingredients, and health & biosciences. We deliver sustainable innovations that elevate everyday products.

Within our Taste Business Unit, Operational Excellence brings together Continuous Improvement, Digital Operations, AI and analytics, Automation, Smart manufacturing, Supply Chain Excellence, and other strategic Operations priorities.

As the Global PMO Manager, Operational Excellence, you will own the governance and management system for the global Operational Excellence portfolio and its connection with broader Operations priorities.

This role is a PMO and portfolio-governance role, but goes far beyond. We are looking for a strategic leader who can create structure, enable alignment, anticipate risks and opportunities, connect initiatives across the organization, and accelerate the delivery of business value across a complex global operations portfolio.

You will provide the transparency, prioritization, integrated planning, financial discipline, governance cadence, and decision support required to translate strategy into coordinated execution. Project and workstream leaders remain accountable for project delivery, resource management, technical decisions, and business outcomes. The PMO governs, coordinates, enables alignment, anticipates risks and opportunities, connects initiatives across the organization and create structure.

You will work closely with Operational Excellence, Operations, Supply Chain, Finance, Engineering, Quality, EHS, Procurement, IT, and site leadership teams across a global organization.

Location: The role can be based in Asturias, Spain, Barcelona, Spain, Gebze, Turkey or Skofja Vas, Slovenia, with hybrid arrangements depending on the country of hire.

 

Where You’ll Make a Difference

Portfolio Strategy, Intake, and Prioritization

• Own the end-to-end governance framework for the global Operational Excellence portfolio, including Continuous Improvement, Digital, Automation, Supply Chain, and related Operations transformation priorities.
• Maintain a consolidated portfolio of initiatives, programs, and strategic commitments across global functions, regions, and manufacturing sites.
• Establish and manage a structured demand-intake and evaluation process, ensuring that proposals have clear sponsorship, strategic alignment, scope, expected value, resource requirements, dependencies, and implementation readiness.
• Facilitate fact-based portfolio prioritization using agreed criteria such as strategic contribution, business value, urgency, feasibility, resource capacity, risk, scalability, and operational impact.
• Develop prioritization scenarios and recommendations for leadership consideration while maintaining transparent decision records and governance traceability.
• Ensure that approved priorities are translated into an integrated, multi-year Operational Excellence roadmap.

Portfolio Planning and Resource Visibility

• Consolidate portfolio plans, milestones, deployment schedules, and key decision points into a single integrated roadmap.
• Provide visibility of resource requirements, available capacity, capability constraints, and competing demands across functions, regions, sites, and workstreams.
• Identify resource conflicts, sequencing constraints, and delivery bottlenecks, and facilitate resolution or escalation through the appropriate governance forums.

Financial and Value

• Partner with Finance and initiative owners to establish consistent standards for business cases, investment requirements, savings classification, benefit baselines, forecasts, and value-realization tracking.
• Maintain portfolio-level visibility of budgets, forecasts, CAPEX/OPEX requirements, expected benefits, and validated value realization.
• Monitor financial and nonfinancial performance against approved baselines and highlight material deviations, assumptions, or value-at-risk.
• Provide leadership with a clear and balanced view of portfolio cost, value, risk, and delivery confidence.

Governance and Executive Decision Support

• Establish consistent portfolio-health criteria covering scope, schedule, financial performance, benefits, resources, risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies, and sustainability.
• Identify emerging risks and systemic constraints early, ensuring clear ownership, mitigation plans, escalation thresholds, and follow-through.
• Challenge incomplete or inconsistent reporting and work with initiative owners to improve portfolio data quality and delivery transparency.
• Track agreed decisions, commitments, corrective actions, and escalations through closure.

• Connect Operational Excellence governance with broader Operations priorities, avoiding duplicated forums, reporting, or competing roadmaps.

PMO Standards, Reporting, and Continuous Improvement

• Create and maintain a reliable single source of truth for portfolio status, milestones, resources, financials, benefits, risks, dependencies, and decisions.
• Develop executive dashboards and analytics that convert portfolio data into actionable insights.
• Capture lessons learned, improve governance effectiveness, and continuously simplify PMO processes to accelerate decision-making and reduce unnecessary administration.

 

What Makes You the Right Fit

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Operations, Supply Chain, Business Administration, Finance, Project Management, or a related discipline.
• 7+ years of experience in PMO, portfolio management, program governance, transformation-office, or enterprise planning roles.
• Demonstrated experience governing a complex portfolio in a global, multi-site, and matrixed Operations or manufacturing environment.
• Strong knowledge of portfolio intake, prioritization, integrated roadmaps, governance design, resource and capacity planning, risk and dependency management, and executive reporting.
• Proven experience in financial and value governance, including business cases, budgets, forecasts, productivity or savings tracking, benefit validation, and value realization.
• Ability to synthesize complex portfolio information into clear options, recommendations, and decisions for senior leaders.
• Strong analytical capability and experience using portfolio-management, reporting, dashboarding, and data-visualization tools.
• Excellent stakeholder-management and influencing skills, with the confidence to constructively challenge senior leaders, functional owners, program leaders, and site teams.
• Strong organizational discipline, attention to detail, and ability to create structure in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English.

 

How You Would Stand Out

• Experience establishing, redesigning, or maturing a global PMO or portfolio-governance operating model.
• Experience across several Operational Excellence domains, such as Continuous Improvement, manufacturing, productivity, reliability, digital operations, automation, smart manufacturing, Supply Chain, or network optimization.
• Experience connecting strategic planning, annual budgeting, portfolio prioritization, and benefits realization into one integrated governance process.
• PMP, Lean Six Sigma, or comparable portfolio, program, project, or Operational Excellence certification.
• Experience in food, ingredients, consumer goods, specialty chemicals, or process manufacturing.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify governance, improve data quality, and enable faster, more fact-based executive decisions.

 

Why Choose Us?

• Shape the governance of a broad, high-impact Global Operational Excellence and Operations transformation portfolio.
• Work across Continuous Improvement, Digital, Automation, Supply Chain, productivity, manufacturing, and other strategic Operations priorities.
• Gain direct exposure to global Operations leadership and support decisions that influence investment, resource allocation, and value creation across the manufacturing network.
• Collaborate with diverse international teams across Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, Procurement and manufacturing sites.
• Join a purpose-driven organization committed to innovation, sustainability, operational excellence, and continuous learning.
• Benefit from flexible hybrid or remote working arrangements, depending on location.

 

#LI-AF1

We are a global leader in taste, scent, and nutrition, offering our customers a broader range of natural solutions and accelerating our growth strategy. At IFF, we believe that your uniqueness unleashes our potential. We value the diverse mosaic of the ethnicity, national origin, race, age, sex, or veteran status. We strive for an inclusive workplace that allows each of our colleagues to bring their authentic self to work regardless of their religion, gender identity & expression, sexual orientation, or disability.

Visit IFF.com/careers/workplace-diversity-and-inclusion to learn more