Research Operations Manager

Introduction:
**EIU Healthcare**, the healthcare arm of the Economist Intelligence Unit, offers healthcare-focused consulting & advisory services, through detailed market research & business intelligence. We assist top medical device, pharmaceutical, biotechnology companies and government entities further their understanding of the healthcare industry, and provide pragmatic and innovative strategies to fulfil their business objectives.

EIU Healthcare aims to further augment its dynamic team by seeking high calibre and talented individuals keen to grow their career.

The Research Operations Manager will be responsible for the development of EIU Healthcare’s sourcing & vendor partnership/alliance strategy.

This includes responsibility for operations related to the successful execution of market research & business intelligence. This includes identifying suitable market research vendors, innovative approaches to address market research needs, tracking current costs and projections, identifying cost saving opportunities, creating competitive environments, creatively negotiate, and generate contracts to assure seamless delivery of market research needs to support the company objectives.

This role is a global role, and will be seen as a business partner to offices based in Singapore, China, US (NYC and Washington) and the UK.

Accountabilities:
**In the role you would be expected to**:
Management of research projects & research fieldwork team, responsible for end-to-end implementation of primary research data collation [60%]
- Manage and mentor full time/ contract staff to fulfil their role, encourage professional development and growth
- Manage the data collection process, partnering with project teams to identify and scope out market research needs, set up the quota sampling design, tracking and finalizing the output
- Partnering with project teams to determine potential vendors and shortlist vendors, ensuring best possible cost effectiveness
- Monitoring of selected vendor’s performance, and identifying improvement initiatives as required

Development of market research sourcing strategy for EIU Healthcare - Gateway [40%]
- Ownership of sourcing strategies based on transparent benchmarking of current performance, resources used, costs incurred and growth projections
- Manage vendor pools, with continuous tracking of performance and cost effectiveness. Identifying new vendors, growing and curating this vendor pool to ensure a seamless pipeline is essential.
- Identify innovative approaches to better improve cost-delivery, and quality delivery, including use of IT, long-term collaborations with vendors, amongst others
- Be a partner to internal teams, to identify suitable professional service providers and approaches, with cross-stakeholder engagement a key part of the role
- Build and maintain a panel that will be able to deliver in-house research capabilities
- Undertake vendor / freelancer trainings and briefing to ensure good quality output from our partners

Experience, skills and professional attributes:
**The ideal skills for this role are**:

- Relevant years of experience in market research or consulting / advisory services
- Exceptional command of written and spoken English. Applicants with proficiency in other languages will be at an advantage
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, in a relevant field
- A personality that enjoys intellectual challenges, and are able to think of innovative solutions to achieve goals
- A strong team player, flexible and able to work in a fast-paced team structure
- A strong interest in the healthcare industry