Position Summary
The Senior Manager Business Unit Cost Management is responsible for establishing and leading the cost management strategy across the IT Systems Business Unit. This role will coordinate cost reduction, cost avoidance, value engineering, productivity, and margin improvement activities across all product lines within the business unit.
Each product line will continue to retain its dedicated cost manager and sustaining engineering resources. The product-line cost managers will report directly within their respective product-line organizations and will have a dotted-line reporting relationship to this position.
The primary objective of this role is to ensure that business-unit and product-line cost targets are clearly defined, supported by actionable plans, rigorously tracked, and consistently met or exceeded.
Responsibilities
Business Unit Cost Strategy
- Develop and lead the overall cost management strategy for the IT Systems Business Unit.
- Translate business-unit financial and margin objectives into specific cost reduction and productivity targets by product line, product family, and program.
- Establish annual, quarterly, and multi-year cost roadmaps aligned with the business unit’s strategic and financial plans.
- Identify cost improvement opportunities across product design, materials, suppliers, manufacturing, logistics, quality, warranty, and lifecycle support.
- Ensure cost management priorities are aligned with product strategy, customer requirements, quality, reliability, and time-to-market objectives.
Cost Target Ownership
- Own the consolidated business-unit cost reduction and productivity plan.
- Ensure that cost targets are allocated appropriately across product lines and supported by credible, time-phased execution plans.
- Monitor performance against cost targets and identify gaps, risks, and recovery actions.
- Drive corrective action when product lines are not on track to meet committed targets.
- Challenge product-line teams to identify additional opportunities and exceed established cost commitments.
- Ensure cost savings are validated, measurable, sustainable, and reflected in the appropriate financial reporting systems.
Dotted-Line Leadership of Product-Line Cost Managers
- Provide strategic direction, governance, tools, and operating standards to product-line cost managers.
- Establish common expectations, processes, definitions, and performance metrics across all product lines.
- Conduct regular operating reviews with product-line cost managers to assess progress, risks, opportunities, and resource requirements.
- Coach and develop the product-line cost managers while respecting their direct reporting relationships within the product lines.
- Facilitate sharing of best practices, supplier intelligence, cost models, benchmarking data, and successful cost reduction approaches across the business unit.
- Support the recruitment, onboarding, development, and succession planning of cost management talent throughout the organization.
- Provide input to product-line leadership regarding the performance and development of the dotted-line cost managers.
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Partner closely with product management, engineering, sustaining engineering, operations, supply chain, procurement, finance, quality, manufacturing, service, and commercial teams.
- Ensure that cost considerations are incorporated into product roadmaps, new product development, sustaining engineering priorities, sourcing decisions, and lifecycle management.
- Work with engineering leaders to prioritize value engineering and design-to-cost initiatives.
- Partner with supply chain and procurement teams to identify supplier negotiations, localization, resourcing, dual-sourcing, and material substitution opportunities.
- Collaborate with finance to establish consistent cost baselines and validate realized savings.
- Work with operations and manufacturing teams to improve labor efficiency, yield, throughput, overhead absorption, and conversion cost.
- Ensure cost reduction actions do not create unacceptable risks related to safety, quality, reliability, regulatory compliance, customer performance, or supply continuity.
Cost Governance and Operating Rhythm
- Establish a consistent business-unit cost management operating cadence.
- Lead monthly and quarterly cost performance reviews with product-line and business-unit leadership.
- Maintain a consolidated pipeline of cost reduction initiatives, including owners, timing, investment requirements, risks, and expected financial impact.
- Implement stage-gate governance for major cost reduction and value engineering initiatives.
- Define clear criteria for opportunity identification, approval, implementation, validation, and financial realization.
- Develop dashboards and scorecards that provide transparent visibility into performance against targets.
- Escalate material gaps, risks, dependencies, and decisions requiring executive intervention.
Cost Analytics and Benchmarking
- Develop and maintain cost models for major products, assemblies, components, and manufacturing processes.
- Lead internal and external benchmarking to identify cost competitiveness gaps.
- Analyze product cost structures and identify the primary drivers of material, labor, overhead, logistics, warranty, and service cost.
- Evaluate make-versus-buy decisions, supplier economics, manufacturing footprint options, and design alternatives.
- Use should-cost analysis, teardown analysis, market intelligence, and supplier benchmarking to identify improvement opportunities.
- Improve the accuracy, consistency, and usability of cost data across the business unit.
New Product and Lifecycle Cost Management
- Ensure design-to-cost and target-cost principles are embedded in the new product development process.
- Establish cost targets at the beginning of product development programs and track progress throughout each development phase.
- Participate in key product and engineering design reviews.
- Ensure new products achieve cost, margin, quality, and performance objectives at launch.
- Develop lifecycle cost improvement plans for existing product platforms.
- Coordinate with sustaining engineering teams to prioritize cost reduction projects based on financial impact, complexity, risk, and resource availability.
- Ensure cost improvement opportunities are considered during product refreshes, redesigns, supplier transitions, and end-of-life planning.
Key Performance Indicators
Performance will be measured against factors including:
- Achievement and overachievement of annual cost reduction targets.
- Realized cost savings versus committed cost savings.
- Gross margin and contribution margin improvement.
- Cost reduction pipeline coverage relative to target.
- Percentage of cost initiatives delivered on time.
- Cost performance of new products at launch.
- Sustaining engineering cost reduction execution.
- Supplier cost reduction and productivity performance.
- Material, labor, manufacturing, logistics, warranty, and service cost improvements.
- Accuracy and consistency of cost reporting.
- Speed of recovery when product lines fall behind plan.
- Adoption of common cost management processes across product lines.
- Development and effectiveness of product-line cost managers.
Requirements:
- Bachelor’s degree in engineering, supply chain, operations, finance, business, or a related field.
- Advanced degree, MBA, or equivalent business experience preferred.
- Typically 12 or more years of experience in cost management, engineering, operations, supply chain, procurement, product management, finance, or a related discipline.
- Significant experience leading cost reduction, value engineering, design-to-cost, or productivity programs in a complex product-based organization.
- Demonstrated success delivering measurable and sustainable cost improvements.
- Experience working across multiple product lines, business units, or global operating regions.
- Strong understanding of product cost structures, including material, labor, overhead, manufacturing, logistics, warranty, and service.
- Experience working with engineering and sustaining engineering teams.
- Experience leading through influence in a matrixed organization.
- Strong financial and analytical capabilities, including the ability to translate technical initiatives into financial outcomes.
- Experience developing executive-level dashboards, operating reviews, and recovery plans.
- Strong communication, negotiation, facilitation, and executive presentation skills.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in data center infrastructure, IT systems, power management, thermal management, racks, rack power distribution, connectivity, remote management, or related hardware systems.
- Experience with global supply chains, contract manufacturers, and complex supplier ecosystems.
- Experience conducting should-cost analysis, teardown analysis, and competitive cost benchmarking.
- Familiarity with product lifecycle management, ERP, cost accounting, sourcing, and business intelligence systems.
- Lean, Six Sigma, value analysis/value engineering, or related certification.
- Experience managing global teams or dotted-line functional organizations.
Leadership Competencies
- Strong ownership and accountability for business results.
- Ability to influence without direct authority.
- Strategic thinking combined with disciplined execution.
- Strong commercial, technical, and financial judgment.
- Ability to challenge assumptions constructively.
- Ability to create alignment across product lines and functions.
- Strong problem-solving and decision-making skills.
- Ability to operate effectively in a complex and fast-moving environment.
- Strong talent development and coaching capabilities.
- High level of credibility with engineering, operations, finance, supply chain, and executive leadership.
Reporting Relationship
This position reports to the leader of the IT Systems Business Unit
Product-line cost managers will maintain their direct reporting relationships within their respective product-line organizations and will have a dotted-line reporting relationship to this position.
Role Mandate
The Senior Manager Business Unit Cost Management will create a unified cost management system across the IT Systems Business Unit while preserving execution ownership within each product line.
The role is accountable for ensuring that cost reduction is not managed as a collection of isolated product-line activities, but as a coordinated business-unit priority with clear targets, common governance, transparent measurement, and disciplined execution.
Success in this position will be defined by the organization’s ability to consistently meet and exceed its cost targets while maintaining product quality, reliability, customer value, supply continuity, and strategic competitiveness.
OUR CORE PRINCIPALS : Safety . Integrity. Respect. Teamwork. Inclusion.
OUR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
• High-Performance Culture
• Customer Focus
• Operational Excellence
• Innovation
• Financial Strength
VERTIV BEHAVIORS
- Own it
- Act with urgency
- Foster a customer-first mindset
- Think big and execute
- Lead by example
- Drive continuous improvement
- Learn and seek out development
- Promote transparent & open communication
About Vertiv
Vertiv (NYSE: VRT) brings together hardware, software, analytics and ongoing services to enable its customers’ vital applications to run continuously, perform optimally and grow with their business needs. Vertiv solves the most important challenges facing today’s data centers, communication networks and commercial and industrial facilities with a portfolio of power, cooling and IT infrastructure solutions and services that extend from the cloud to the edge of the network. Headquartered in Westerville, Ohio, USA, Vertiv employs around 34,000 people and does business in more than 130 countries. Visit Vertiv.com to learn more.
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Vertiv is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. We promote equal opportunities for all with respect to hiring, terms of employment, mobility, training, compensation, and occupational health, without discrimination as to age, race, color, religion, creed, sex, pregnancy status (including childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity / expression (including transgender status or sexual stereotypes), genetic information, citizenship status, national origin, protected veteran status, political affiliation, or disability. If you have a disability and are having difficulty accessing or using this website to apply for a position, you can request help by sending an email to [email protected] .
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