Job Description
The Executive Director, Merchandising Business Development and Strategy leads a team responsible for delivering Sales and Margin goals while building a pipeline of future opportunities. The Exec. Director will manage a broad portfolio of critical efforts across key areas to drive business development, analysis and planning toward the goal of Category Profit Improvement across the front of store (General Merchandise/Consumables, Health, Beauty and Personal Care).
The Exec. Director should have a passion for using business process, operations analysis, and data to drive business decision making, exceptional storytelling ability, a passion for understanding customer behavior, and the ability to align senior executives to a vision and roadmap that delivers results in an often-ambiguous environment.
Partnering and relationship building will be key as this position will lead a team that collaborates with senior leaders across the enterprise to implement value driving projects at CVS Health – and aligning the above with concurrent enterprise initiatives. This position will also work closely with senior leadership (primarily Merchandising, but also across Store Operations, Supply Chain, and beyond) to evolve both internal and joint business planning efforts towards greater customer centricity, better addressing granular, local dynamics.
Key responsibilities:
• Spearhead colleague engagement opportunities including merchandising simplification, hours of operation efforts and opportunities, in partnership with Operations and Workforce Management, to drive growth at a store-level
• Identify additional labor hours pilots, curating market-specific treatments to identify optimal labor investments, promotion, inventory treatment – including test design (market selection), fleet coordination, and results measurement
• Build, maintain and expand a cross-functional pipeline of ongoing innovation and capability-expanding opportunities to drive growth for CVS in-year as well as in the future
• Support ongoing strategic pricing reviews to identify opportunities to drive growth through customer relevancy
• Conduct periodic executive-level analyses and reviews, such as comparisons of market share changes and drivers and earnings, board, etc. Front Store commentary
Private Label (Our ‘Store Brands’) Strategic Sourcing Support
• Support Store Brand leadership and product development organization through strategic and opportunistic RFPs to shift and optimize our supplier portfolio to drive heightened relevancy, enhanced value, expanded brand perception, and a premium offering
• Lead both strategic negotiations and analytics to drive optimal outcomes through new supplier sourcing and/or transitions
• Partner with Store Brand leadership on additional special projects and new opportunities, across the breadth of assortment, promotions, and pricing
Third Party Data Partnerships, Monetization, and Assets
• Lead day-to-day coordination with third party commercial team, guiding ongoing and future overhaul and transition of legacy customer data provider to joint customer & POS platform
• Lead commercial team to maximize utility of data for vendors and internal partners and continue to drive incremental share of revenue for CVS
• Evolve and expand our best-in-class assortment and localization engine, enhancing user-interface, driving integration across different merchandising use cases, and deploying against new and future opportunities
• Leverage customer, demographic, and store datasets to respond to local store dynamics more granularly, including assortment, price, and promotion levers
• Partner with Field Merchandising Managers & Seasonal team to better curate our assortment for exceptional stores (e.g., Beach, Snowbird) and capitalize on a typical store-specific seasonality by enhancing inventory allocation methodologies
• Lead Assortment Optimization efforts across all core front store categories throughout the annual reset cycle, identifying opportunities to drive incremental sales and margin in partnership with category management
• Review product & vendor economics along with customer transferability data to unlock incremental growth through curated assortment, price, and promo strategies –contemplating the aggregate national and store brand portfolio for holistic P&L improvement
• Develop store-category level clustering capability to augment current assortment and planogram design capabilities, driving incremental growth through customer relevancy
• Partner with Analytics & Behavior Change on co-developing best-in-class advanced analytics platform, augmenting capabilities with incremental use cases for the engine (e.g. markdown modeling, market share impacts, basket economics)
• Leverage market share data, in partnership with field leadership, to understand customer and local competitive dynamics to pilot targeted in-market tests
Pay Range
The typical pay range for this role is:
Minimum: 131,500
Maximum: 297,250
Please keep in mind that this range represents the pay range for all positions in the job grade within which this position falls. The actual salary offer will take into account a wide range of factors, including location.
Required Qualifications
The ideal candidate will be able to communicate complex concepts in easy-to-understand ways for the executive management team. In addition, the candidate should be able to effectively influence decision making of leadership to act on identified opportunities.
•10 years' experience at either a leading retailer/CPG or strategic management consulting firm or combination of both, leading strategic/ commercial projects with significant business impact
• Experience managing resources leveraging large data sets: 5 years of working knowledge and experience in data analysis using sophisticated platforms such as SAP, SAP BI, Teradata and Oracle.
• Must be able to architect data analysis from these platforms and translate the analytics/data sets into business actions and insights, additionally, must be able to present findings to senior leadership and convince the business owner to act
• Strong understanding of databases, data extraction especially SQL, Tableau, Microsoft Excel based modelling, and SAS
• Translate business questions and hypotheses into complex analyses using extremely large data sets (including query design), determine the conclusions & business implications, and present the findings to business stakeholders
• Operational improvement expertise: Diagnose issues and improve overall merchandising operations through engineering analysis and design
• Leadership and influencing skills: Highly developed relationship-building skills to foster effective working relations with senior leaders across the Retail Merchandising team, functional and divisional leaders, and the Corporate Executive Committee
• Structured and logical thinking: the ability to dissect a problem into an organized approach and quickly form a hypothesis against which to run test analysis
• Analytical rigor: Excellent analytical and modeling capabilities that include a) advanced Excel and Access skills, b) familiarity with various Business Intelligence Applications (SAP, SAP BI, Teradata, and Oracle SQL) and the ability to work with large datasets and c) fluency with analytical and statistical modeling techniques
• Powerful communications: the ability to communicate effectively and succinctly, both verbally and on paper. Mastery of storytelling via Microsoft Power Point, email, and other forms of communication is critical to this role
• Retail Experience
Preferred Qualifications
• Advanced Degree
Education
• Bachelor’s Degree
Business Overview
Bring your heart to CVS Health Every one of us at CVS Health shares a single, clear purpose: Bringing our heart to every moment of your health. This purpose guides our commitment to deliver enhanced human-centric health care for a rapidly changing world. Anchored in our brand — with heart at its center — our purpose sends a personal message that how we deliver our services is just as important as what we deliver. Our Heart At Work Behaviors™ support this purpose. We want everyone who works at CVS Health to feel empowered by the role they play in transforming our culture and accelerating our ability to innovate and deliver solutions to make health care more personal, convenient and affordable. We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an affirmative action employer, and is an equal opportunity employer, as are the physician-owned businesses for which CVS Health provides management services. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring, promotion, or any other personnel action based on race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, age, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We proudly support and encourage people with military experience (active, veterans, reservists and National Guard) as well as military spouses to apply for CVS Health job opportunities.