Supplier Audit Lead

Job Title: Supplier Audit Lead

Job Location: Sunbury-on-Thames (Hybrid)

Length: 12 month contract

Industry: Oil and Energy

Job Description (Supplier Audit Lead)

Responsible for delivering the finance-procurement global supplier audit programme. You will lead a portfolio of audits through their life cycle, ensuring their timely and quality execution and outcomes. Developing effective working relationships with multiple stakeholders is fundamental to the success of the programme, as is robust management of our audit execution firms. Data management, analysis and reporting is a key to enabling performance management of the programme, and the identification of key results, trends and high value learnings and recommendations. You will also support bp to continuously improve its risk management of suppliers through stakeholder communication and engagement activities aimed at influencing improvement actions and change.

Our supplier audits assess supplier’s compliance with bp’s contractual terms and conditions, covering commercial remuneration and compliance obligations i.e. anti-bribery and corruption. This role will focus on the ethical and compliance obligations elements of the contract.

Our audit programme’s objective, and a key deliverable of this role, is to bring visibility to internal and external contract performance issues to improve supplier performance and compliance. You will be accountable for the smooth running and delivery of the audit plan, management of the audit firms, supervision of the Audit Analyst and the robust capture of audit data and results. We are part of bp’s second line of defence.

Job Description:

In this role you will:

• Through the audit execution partners and Audit Analyst deliver the allocated portfolio of supplier audits, ensuring on-time execution and quality outputs. Facilitate the on-time and successful closure of any identified audit findings.
• Performance manage the audit execution partners to ensure timely delivery, removal of blockers to delivery and supporting escalations/interventions as required.
• Establish and maintain effective working relationships with a wide range of stakeholders, such as audit firms, suppliers, contract owners, business user of the contracts, and SMEs i.e. legal, Ethics & Compliance.
• Lead risk and control conversations with leadership, suppliers, procurement and business stakeholders to help them understand the audit findings, the underpinning control gaps and required remedial actions.
• Confidently influence suppliers and bp stakeholders on contract compliance accountabilities and expectations. And communicate general good practice in ethical and compliance related controls.
• Develop the annual supplier audit plan, ensuring the selection of candidates is risk-based, leverages data, analytics and past learnings.
• Promote and ensure conformance to the bp digital and data security protocols throughout the audit process.
• Conduct quality control/assurance of the audit process to ensure the principles of professional audit competency is upheld – integrity, independence and due professional care.
• Ensure audit reports are well-articulated and clearly linked to contract requirements, and that workpapers that are consistently prepared, documented, and filed, as specified in the defined audit protocols and can meet the tests of rigour, re-performance.
• The ability to make sound judgements on whether key compliance risks are adequately managed is critical to ensure risk-based proportionate decisions.
• Extract audit key learnings and recommendations to enable improvement actions based on root cause analysis and lessons learned, to minimise the risks of repeat audit findings.
• Ensure audit platform/database is populated to enable accurate and complete results reporting, and an audit trail of audit closure and collections of recoveries.
• Monitor and produce timely accurate statistical and analytical reporting to support supplier audit reporting requirements i.e. results, trends, root causes, recommendations, audit partner performance and audit costs.
• Contribute to the transformation of the supplier audit program to enable greater value creation. Ensure continuous improvement of the supplier audit process and methodology based on the principles of effectiveness, simplification, and efficiency.

What you will need to be successful:

• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in accounting, finance, supply chain, or business administration.
• Proven experience of developing and or providing assurance on anti-bribery and corruption related compliance programmes is required. Other third-party risk management experience would also be desirable.
• Recognised audit qualification and a minimum 5 years’ experience in internal audit, audit management, ethics & compliance/integrity, third party contract compliance, risk assessment, risks and controls.
• Strong organisational and programme management skills, with an eye for detail and the ability to anticipate risks or issues.
• Confident hands-on experience with data management, data manipulation, reporting and analysis.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. Ability to understand the underlying business problem, and then effectively communicate to internal and external stakeholders in a concise and impactful manner.
• Ability to influence and collaborate with internal stakeholders across multiple disciplines, cultures and geographies, across organizational boundaries and levels within bp and with suppliers. Great people skills and the ability to quickly gain the trust and respect of others.
• Expert knowledge and experience in Microsoft Excel, Power BI, Word and PowerPoint applications
• An agile mindset to meet the demands of the role whilst being customer-centric and pragmatic.

Desirable

• Understanding of procurement and contracting processes and systems.
• Experience working in a global environment.
• Languages (e.g. Arabic, French, Azeri, Russian, German)
• Ability to build visualization dashboards in Microsoft Power BI.
• Working knowledge of systems such as Ariba and SAP business modules.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, gender, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.