Director Planning & Forecasting Analytic

Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:

This is a senior role within the planning and analytics EM ecommerce team and is part of the planning and analytics management team.

The selected candidate is expected to drive advanced planning & forecasting for adidas EM eCommerce and is responsible for owning, planning and delivering business targets.

Based on internal & external data sources, the selected candidate will manage adoption of forecast models, data capabilities, product insights, etc that helps drive adidas EM eCommerce business objectives from strength to strength.

Key Responsibilities:

• Drive the EM eCommerce business performance (Sales, MD%, OP%, KPIs) and forecast with forecast accuracy
• During MCMs, play a key role in driving targets by ensuring alignment between insights and actions, fostering seamless execution, and maintaining a strong focus on achieving outcomes over predefined ownership boundaries
• Keep country clusters eCommerce leads across key business decisions while building constructive relationships with them
• Implement forecasting capabilities through application of the full set of advanced analysis methodologies. This includes partnering with data science for framing of business needs, data exploration as well as descriptive, predictive and prescriptive modeling.
• Identify demand gaps againt budget, future risks and uplift and provide visibility and actionable insights to the broad stakeholders to ensure targets are achieved.
• Partner with post order operations and finance to adopt and adhere to the agreed forecast and demand management approach and follow-up actions.
• Share insights in digestible form within the eCommerce and marketing teams to facilitate actions
• Internalize product performance, buying and trading opportunities to planning and forecasting to unleash growth at scale. Do this by building constructive connections with the buying, planning and trading community.
• Monitor and analyze market trends and competitor activities and derive conclusions for the growth of EM eCommerce, identifying gaps, opportunities and risk within business and mitigating the same
• Develop and maintain a strong stakeholder network with high level of trust that facilitates action- ability of insights.
• Prepare communication and communicate to SLT as and when needed to keep them abreast of EM eCommerce business performance

People Management:

• Create a colaborative work environment in which employees are coached, trained and provided with career and development opportunities and have a strength of purpose
• Continuously monitor and evaluate team workload and organizational efficiency with the support of data and team feedback and make appropriate changes to meet business needs.
• Provide team members/direct reports with clear direction and targets that are aligned with business needs and company objectives

Key Relationships:

• EM Hub eCommerce team
• EM Function teams (Finance, DNA, Brand, Sales, SCM…)
• Country-Clusters (C/C) market teams & group functions
• Global Digital teams
• Global BI & Analytics teams
• External vendors

Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:

• Degree with focus in Business, Engineering, Finance, Economics, Math or related field preferred, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• 10+ years of experience working in eCommerce, eCommerce data analytics, digital analytics, eCommerce business intelligence, demand forecasting, or equivalent experience
• Experience in or familiarity with analytics platforms, especially in their integration or deriving insights requiring multiple sources
• Industry: Ideally in apparel/fashion/footwear or internet
• Experience in leading cross-geography teams
• Cultural understanding of Emerging Market cluster countries having lived, worked or studied there
• Past experiernce of being accountable for planning ecommerce net sales
• Exposure to market places and their key drivers is good to have

Knowledge & Soft Skills:

• Broad understanding and passion for a long term digital career
• Understanding of multi-platform eCommerce
• Ability to efficiently work in a cross-functional organization, ability to develop influential and collaborative relationships with stakeholders from digital and non-digital disciplines on all levels
• Excellent communication & negotiation skills, comfortable in honestly presenting business challenges and opportunities at various organizational levels
• A passion for contributing to new data capabilities, tools, and frameworks. Devotion to accuracy, reliability, rigor, and user-focused design.
• Creative and energetic team player
• Outspoken and confident

Hard Skills:

• Experience in analytics, BI and implementing demand and financial forecasting
• Hands-on experience with data visualization with Power BI and ability to request desired dashboards via JIRA and other project management tools
• Experience of having orchestrated mega commercial moments such as BFCM, 11.11 and more
• Proficient in MS Office (with an emphasis on Excel), SQL
• Experience of working on Databricks is highly desirable
• Experience with process design and process improvements, automation, etc.
• Fluent English both verbally and written
• Plus would be considered:
  • Understanding of traffic analytics, marketing & media KPIs and ROI
  • Experience with Web Analytics and Native app (iOS/Android) analytics (Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Amplitude, AppsFlyer, etc).
  • Experience in working with data science and data product teams