[The Netherlands] Senior Channel Manager EMEA

Santen is a specialized company with a proud 130-year heritage focused exclusively on eye health. As a Japan-originated, global company with our footprint in over 60 countries and regions, our mission is to provide essential and significant value to patients and society through our products and services created from our expertise in ophthalmology and from the patient’s perspective.

The Senior Channel Manager EMEA is responsible for monitoring and optimizing trade flows across the EMEA region to safeguard product availability, minimize revenue leakage, and support commercial objectives while complying with all applicable legislation and regulations. The role designs and governs robust trade-monitoring and supply-optimization processes, ensures compliance with internal policies, and acts as a key interface between supply chain, commercial teams, and regional stakeholders. Through advanced analytics, governance, and cross-functional collaboration, the role drives transparency, risk mitigation, and continuous improvement across the supply network

What you will do

• Monitor and optimize trade flows across EMEA, identifying parallel trade, grey-channel activity, and diversion risks through dashboards, analytics, and KPIs.

• Design, implement, and continuously improve trade-monitoring systems, including metrics, alerts, investigation protocols, and corrective action processes.

• Implement and oversee the Supply Management Optimization (SMO) process, maintaining monthly sales allocations by country, product, and customer.

• Resolve blocked sales and allocation exceptions through data validation, root-cause analysis, and close collaboration with supply chain and market teams.

• Manage parallel import (PI) notifications, ensuring standardized processes, governance, audit trails, and full compliance with EU legislation and internal frameworks.

• Act as a central interface between supply chain, countries, finance, legal, compliance, and other stakeholders to ensure effective governance and execution of supply optimization policies.

• Partner with commercial and market teams to provide insights on channel dynamics, distributor behavior, market flows, and trade risks, supporting launches, pricing, and packaging decisions.

• Consolidate SMO, PI, and supply-chain KPIs into clear dashboards and executive reports, delivering timely insights to senior leadership.

• Drive continuous improvement initiatives by leveraging digital tools, advanced analytics, and process optimization to reduce cost, mitigate risk, and enhance transparency.

What you will bring to the role

• A Master’s degree in business administration, economics, supply chain management, or a related field, with fluency in English (written and spoken).

• At least 8 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry, with a strong background in trade monitoring, channel management, and supply-chain optimization across EMEA markets.

• Solid knowledge of European trade regulations, parallel trade dynamics, compliance requirements, and anti-leakage strategies.

• Strong analytical capabilities, with hands-on experience using data analytics tools, Power BI, ERP/SCM systems, and trade-monitoring platforms.

• Proven ability to define KPIs, interpret complex data, identify risk patterns, and translate insights into actionable recommendations.

• Experience working in cross-functional environments, collaborating with supply chain, commercial, finance, legal, regulatory, and compliance teams.

• Excellent stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to influence without authority and lead governance forums across multiple geographies.

• A structured, process-oriented mindset, comfortable designing SOPs, maintaining audit trails, and driving continuous improvement initiatives.

• Strong communication, ownership, and strategic thinking skills, with the agility to operate effectively in a dynamic and highly regulated environment.

Grow your career at Santen

A career at Santen is an opportunity to make a difference. We aspire to contribute to the realization of “Happiness with Vision” by providing eye health products and services to patients, consumers, and medical professionals around the world. Guided by our CORE PRINCIPLE, “Tenki ni sanyo suru”, Santen is engaged in the global research & development, manufacturing, and sales and marketing of pharmaceutical products in ophthalmology. We have team members around the world using their diverse talents to unlock new modalities and drive innovations for patient outcomes, education and treatment. At Santen, we believe in empowering all our team members with flexible ways of working and a highly inclusive work environment. 

The Santen Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to building diverse teams and ensuring a safe and inclusive physical and virtual workplace for every one of our team members. All employment decisions are based on business needs, role requirements and individual qualifications regardless of race, color, ethnicity, national origin/ancestry, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity/ expression, age, disability, medical condition, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.  

If you require any kind of accommodation during our recruitment process, please let the recruiter from our team know.