Merchandising Operations - Business Acceleration -Manager

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.

Business Overview:

At CVS Health, we are joined in a common purpose: helping people on their path to better health. We are working to transform health care through innovations that make quality care more accessible, easier to use, less expensive and patient-focused. Working together and organizing around the individual, we are pioneering a new approach to total health that puts people at the heart.

We strive to promote and sustain a culture of diversity, inclusion and belonging every day. CVS Health is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. We do not discriminate in recruiting, hiring or promotion based on race, ethnicity, sex/gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability or protected veteran status or on any other basis or characteristic prohibited 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.

The Merch Ops – Business Acceleration team develops and recommends strategies to improve business performance by working closely with Merchandising leadership in analyzing market trends and dynamics, vendor/brand economics and productivities, customer loyalty, and related assortment optimization opportunities. The team leverages strategic sourcing and vendor negotiation tactics to bolster the impact of strategic recommendations and incrementally improve business outcomes.

The Merch Ops – Business Acceleration, Manager will be charged with supporting and driving select strategy and profit improvement initiatives in partnership with Category Managers and Category Management leadership.

The hiring manager will consider entry level candidates for high potential self-starting, intellectually curious, entrepreneurial new graduates, as well as more experienced professionals with the same qualities.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Perform analysis to identify sales, cost, and profit opportunities across SKUs and vendors through rigorous analysis and research, including: assessment of SKU/Vendor/Brand/Promotional incrementality, competitive benchmarking (space, brands, SKUs), market insights, customer insights (surveys, Customer analytics), vendor insight (cost structures, motivations), and extensive SKU/brand/vendor-level analysis (relative productivity, profitability, brand loyalty, transferability, etc.).
• Enact a customer-first perspective, understanding when to approach problems through a macro, cross-team lens, necessary to reflect how customers shop at CVS (e.g., trips, basket analyses).
• Based on data analytics, drive the execution of performance improvement projects, including getting stakeholder buy-in from cross-functional teams (e.g. Merchandising, Inventory, Analytics).
• Establish working relationships and gain support across all levels and functions within the enterprise including Category Managers, Divisional Merchandising Managers (Sr. Directors), and Retail Team Merchandising Managers (VPs).
• Develop analytical materials to be shared internally during category reviews and assortment discussions with the Merchandising team.
• Provide direct vendor negotiations support to Merchants, including developing “Ask” materials to be shared with vendors.
• Enhance and enforce documentation, archiving, and audit processes for agreements with vendors.
• Work on special projects, ad hoc analysis, and initiatives related to assortment performance and cost reduction and management.
• Use a 'Test and Learn' mindset: assist in designing initiative pilots and deploying in select number of stores to measure and assess. Determine how and when to scale successful cases.

Successful candidate will exhibit:

• Intense interest in learning new things and intellectual curiosity
• An open and honest communication style that quickly builds trust and respect
• Outstanding analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to conceptualize complex quantitative analysis and build analy