Business Development, Trade Optimization at Kantar Retail in New York, NY

The Solution Advisor is part of the Global Advisory team at Kantar Consulting Trade Optimisation (KCTO) and is a subject matter expert in trade promotion management and sales planning with international experience.In this role, the individual has at least 10 years’ experience in the Consumer Goods industry, and will be bridging the gap between the KCTO solution and client’s business teams, with direct involvement in solution design and delivery and process re-engineering with a focus on sales processes and integration with other functional areas (finance, demand planning).

Kantar Consulting’s XTEL Trade Optimization software is a powerful, end-to-end solution supporting the trade promotion lifecycle, from planning through retail execution, sales intelligence, and distributor management for the global consumer goods industry.

The Solution Advisor takes part in a variety of high profile sales transformation projects, being primarily involved during the define and design phase of projects to shape the overall process and solution design to generate maximum value for our clients. The Solution Advisor is responsible for capturing and validating the client’s business requirements, being able to operate both at a top-level end to end process level and at a more detailed level mapping roles and activities across functional boundaries for specific processes. The Solution Advisor will work closely with our functional consultants to deliver the solution blueprint.

KEY OUTCOMES

• Delivers Business focused end to end KTO solution walk through, highlighting best practise, anticipating challenges and sharing lessons learnt to elicit and define the business requirements
• Identifies and evaluates the business requirement for relevance and priority, challenging when appropriate based on maturity (crawl, walk, run). Ensures specific business scenarios are captured. Proposes conceptual or high-level approaches
• Functional design validation: sense checks the functional proposal is aligned with the business need and will support an optimal user experience.
• Fit/Gap assessment: influences the client to prioritize the requirement correctly and support workarounds where necessary.
• End to End Solution Design; sense checks if the end to end business solution is efficient and not over engineered or too complex
• High Level Cutover Plan/ Strategy: provides a reality check on cutover (history loading) and a framework of best practice and lessons learnt.
• Business QA & Build Reviews: Tests the solution before handing over to the client. Ensures the data makes business sense. Provides input into UAT test script approach. Leads Build Reviews
• High Level Cutover Plan, SIT training & Collaterals: Builds training manuals focusing on end to end process and solution steps and trains the central team for SIT. In consultation with the PM defines cut-over approach
• UAT Health Check & Key User Training: Tests the UAT environment focusing on application and data to ensure environment is ready for UAT. Runs the UAT training sessions / walk throughs to demonstrate the agreed solution functionality and process.
• UAT 1st level Support & Defect Validation: Provides support to the users (questions – how to’s) and first level of checking to confirm if a defect is system bug, data issue, CR or an issue with understanding.
• End User Training: Supports the client with end-user training and or Kantar Consulting / Third Parties with solution and process support.
• Business Cutover: Supports the business team in loading the data required and validating the output to secure a successful go-live.
• Business Adoption & Support: Supports the client to embed the new solution
• Voice of the User: Carries out interviews with the user community to understand what is working well, what can be improved. Provides recommendations and supports change requests

KEY CAPABILITIES

• 10 years of Consumer Goods experience, this must include at least 5 years working within a Tier 1 Consumer Good company, either in a sales or sales support function (e.g. Key Account Manager, or Sales Solutions Manager)
• Direct experience in core sales processes including business planning, trade promotion management and trade terms
• Experience of working with international market leading Trade Promotion Management solutions to provide a broad perspective of solution capabilities. In most cases, our clients are implementing global or regional solutions and therefore experience of working in different regions is highly desirable but with experience of North America a specific requirement for this role
• Experience of the full end to end cycle of Trade Promotion Management projects; business case definition, project mobilisation, requirements gathering, functional design, data cleansing, testing, end user training and post go live support (help desk functions)
• Experience of working on multi-country projects to be able to advise the client on best practice, lessons learnt, typical challenges and share case studies.
• A proven track record of operating at a senior management and executive level as the subject matter expert with an ability to influence at all levels of a client organisation
• Systems integration experience with ERP solutions (e.g. SAP or JDE) and Demand Planning Solutions (SAP APO, Manugistics etc.)