Sr Analyst Commercial Planning

Job Location: Hershey, PA or Open to Remote

 

ROLE SUMMARY:

With an unbiased view, robust analytical framework, and cross-functional perspective, the Senior Analyst, Commercial Planning (Salty Brands) will work with the Manager, Commercial Planning (Salty Brands) to take a lead role in providing multi-year portfolio planning, insights, and recommendations to influence strategic decision making and enable dynamic business management across Hershey’s Salty brands portfolio.

 

• In conjunction with Manager, takes an active role in both annual and monthly planning process, aggregating and pressure-testing inputs from brand, demand, and customer teams to develop a vetted, integrated plan for assigned customers or category.
• Helps commercial team make more informed decisions on trade-offs across brands and customers and provides a common starting point for in-year forecasting.
• Leads cross-functional meetings among Brand, Sales, Demand, Media, and Finance teams, helps develop gross sales targets, owns the monthly Consensus building consensus building blocks and performance tracking for in-year and out-year assumptions.
• Analyzes performance vs. plan to gain holistic view of gaps.
• Consolidates, pressure-tests, and measures financial impact of gap-filling activities.
• Partners with internal and external teams to build tracking/visualization capabilities to advance swift business decisions.
• Works across the organization to provide effective flow of information to track Strategic Investment assumptions and their impact to the plan.
• Signals risks, identifies opportunities, and evaluates gap-filling actions to deliver sufficiency across building blocks.

 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

 

• In conjunction with Manager, Commercial Planning (Salty Brands), comprehends, pressure-tests and synthesizes disparate inputs from various functional areas of the organization, including but not limited to media plans, national and customer-specific promotional plans, innovation, inventory management, packtype strategy, and category distribution strategy.
• In conjunction with Manager, Commercial Planning (Salty Brands), help to advance and optimize the current IBM process to improve sharing of information across cross-functional teams and decision making.
• Measures incremental impact of activities (aggregates and looks historically across pack types)
• In conjunction with Salty Commercial Planning Team, Sales Planning, Demand Planning, Innovation/OPM, Marketing and Finance teams, develops Plan for assigned business unit(s) via integration of bottoms-up and top-down planning assumptions.
• As part of the Integrated Business Management (IBM) process, owns monthly Consensus building and performance tracking for assigned business unit(s); accountable for delivering and continuously improving Consensus accuracy at brand/packtype level.
• Comprehensively analyzes the business to understand implications to Plan and Consensus and analyzes performance vs. plan to gain holistic view of gaps.
• Develops KPI’s and/or scorecards to track and monitor in-year performance and status of pipeline projects.
• Provide thought leadership on visual dashboards to create that will improve the IBM planning and decision-making processes, and lead a small team of internal/external consultants in the development and deployment of those dashboards.
• Works with Brand, Sales Planning, and Demand Planning teams to identify and appropriately size Risks & Opportunities; grasps challenges and topline/bottom line impact associated with gap-filling activities.
• Maintains thorough and explicit record of key planning assumptions by building block and growth lever.
• Provides meaningful contributions to organizational decision-making and planning processes.
• In conjunction with Manager, Commercial Planning (Salty Brands), takes an active role in 3-year strategic planning to ensure Salty annual growth targets are in-line with company long-term vision tracking accordingly.

 

QUALIFICATIONS (Knowledge, Skills, Education, Experience, etc.):

Education: Bachelor’s degree required
Experience: 2-3 years of experience in Analytics role (e.g., Marketing, Sales, Category Management, or Analytics)

 

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