The Director will lead a team of Assortment Planning professionals to provide analytical services and strategic support to Merchandising leadership. This individual is responsible for process ownership and execution for Product Line Reviews, Assortment Plans and Business Reviews. The goal of this team is to provide analysis and recommendations that assist the Merchants improve their overall assortments and deliver improved and sustainable financial performance. This will include conducting advanced modeling and analytics leveraging proprietary data and elasticity/other related models in order to provide strategic and actionable insights to leadership and category merchants around pricing. In addition, this leader is expected to integrate existing processes related to our assortments in order to improve our speed to market (external market conditions, competitive landscape, pricing, vendor analysis, cost analysis, product trends, etc.). The team is accountable to annual sales, profitability and cost improvements associated with PLR outcomes. This team will work closely with the Merchandising Organization to execute against these objectives while improving the current process.

Key Responsibilities:

• 30% Develop, implement and integrate processes for Assortment Plans, Business Reviews and Product Line Reviews to enable better decision making, at faster speed, with improved collaboration across all key stakeholders.
• 30% Lead execution of detailed Assortment Plans, Business Reviews and Product Line Reviews. Work with merchants to determine needs by category. Provide analysis on a standard set of analytics that provide actionable insights on assortment opportunities and the go-forward strategy for a category.
• 20% Development of tools and processes to improve merchandise assortment analytics. Partner with cross functional teams e.g. Space, Pricing, IPR, etc to drive better collaboration during PLR process and create better analytical outcomes for a category.
• 20% Builds, leads and develops a team of assortment planning professionals

Direct Manager/Direct Reports:

• This position reports to VP or Sr. Director Assortment Planning
• This position has 4-7 Direct Reports

Travel Requirements:

• Typically requires overnight travel less than 10% of the time.

Physical Requirements:

• Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.

Working Conditions:

• Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.

Minimum Qualifications:

• Must be eighteen years of age or older.
• Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree preferred – MBA
• Strong process development experience
• Computer skills sufficient to retrieve, manipulate, analyze, and interpret data
• Project management experience
• Ability to multi task in a highly complex, ambiguous environment
• Ability to lead change

Minimum Education:

• The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor’s degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.

Preferred Education:

• No additional education

Minimum Years of Work Experience:

• 10

Preferred Years of Work Experience:

• No additional years of experience

Minimum Leadership Experience:

• None

Preferred Leadership Experience:

• None

Certifications:

• None

Competencies:

• Knowledge of merchandising and retail, as well as other related functions
• (marketing, operations, etc.)
• Knowledge of pricing analytics and strategy
• Knowledge of statistical, econometric, quantitative analysis
• Understanding of computational methods and applicability to business problems
• Strong business acumen
• Ability to build relationships across functions and influence decisions
• Strategic thinking
• Familiarity with use of statistical programming software
• Proficient Power Point and Excel
• Executive communication skills – Strong written and verbal communication skills
• required