Retail Industry Analyst

Retail Industry Analyst

Title: Retail Industry Analyst
Location: Texas-Irving
The Retail Industry Analyst should have a minimum of 3-5 years retail industry experience working directly for a major consulting firm focused on General Merchandise or Food/Drug/Mass retailers. This experience should include profit and loss understanding, addressing real world challenges occurring in merchandising, marketing, store operations, supply chain, and/or finance. The candidate must understand how to leverage data to drive business improvements, and have experience in supporting or performing actual solution implementations at client sites including requirements gathering/documentation, metric definition/validation, source system analysis, data mapping and a high level understanding of logical data modeling. Business process modeling is also desirable. Bachelor's Degree required and Master's Degree preferred.

Job Summary:
The primary responsibility of the Retail Industry Analyst is to leverage Retail Industry knowledge to promote the sale and support the implementation of data warehouse or business intelligence solutions. A broad understanding of issues prevalent in merchandising, marketing, store operations, logistics, demand / supply chain is required. Working with a Senior Industry Consultant, the Retail Industry Analyst helps crystallize the business problems facing our clients, capturing and documenting the functional, system and data requirements around which we can develop a solution including:
· Analyzing gaps between current/desired states
· Rationalizing metrics and reports
· Designing and executing use & test cases
· Developing and maintaining client relationships by providing status updates, leading meetings, creating and maintaining plans, etc.
· Discovering and documenting business and IT processes and workflows
· Assisting the industry consulting practice with demand creation, sales activities, and collateral development
· Interfacing with other functional areas, centers of expertise and technical groups across our enterprise

Working across the spectrum of industry consulting activities, this role offers a great opportunity for career development, in addition to tackling complex and stimulating challenges. This will enable the Industry Consultant Analyst to accumulate the requisite skills and experiences to become a subject matter expert in a particular area of choice.


Major Activities:
· Play a support role on large, complex data warehouse implementations, or multiple smaller projects
· Work with Industry Consulting practice and/or account teams to identify and generate new business
· Understand and document clients' existing business processes, requirements, and issues, and match needs to Teradata business solutions
· Facilitate the development of new strategies and business requirements to be enabled by data warehousing solutions
· Architect a business solution in support of those strategies
· Provide thought leadership and internally and externally
· Stay abreast of industry issues and trends to identify target opportunities
· Network with key industry contacts and clients

The role will carry a billable utilization target of 75-85% or a minimum of 1200 hours. Much of the non-billable time will be dedicated to ongoing training and support of the National Consulting Practice in collateral development.

High Performance Characteristics:
A successful candidate should be driven, creative, a self-starter, strategic thinker, with the ability to work independently and with a team.

· Client Service Oriented - Works to anticipate internal and external client needs. Has an overriding commitment to client satisfaction, developing a 'trusted advisor' role within client organization is critical.
· Innovative and Resourceful - Draws from a large pool of diverse resources or information. Develops new approaches for situations in which standard approaches do not apply.
· Adaptable - Adjusts to multiple demands, shifting priorities, ambiguity, and rapid change. Accepts and adapts to new or alternative approaches.

Competencies:
1. Consulting and facilitation skills
2. Experience with large scale data warehouse or decision support solutions
3. Presentation & communication skills at the executive level
4. Business acumen and strong mathematical skills
5. Forward-thinking, trend analysis and interpretation
6. Ability to articulate a vision and break it into executable steps
7. Willingness to travel 75%
8. Familiar with sales tactics
9. Knowledge of consulting competition
10. Issue and conflict resolution

Teradata Values:
· Respect for Others
· Customer Dedication
· Highest Standards of Integrity
· Commitment to Excellence
· Accountability for Success

Work Environment:This position is working in a virtual office environment, including home office, client site, hotels, and others. A combination of independent work and team collaboration will be required. Travel expectation is at least 75% within the USA.

Required Skills and Experience:
· Retail domain knowledge
· A firm understanding of the business processes and metrics that drive success in retailing
· Ability to use retail experience to provide a consultative approach to business problems using highly developed written, conversation and presentation skills
· Experience with EDW and/or BI implementations
· High level understanding of data warehousing and business intelligence, including requirements gathering, data mapping/ modeling methodologies, key metric/formulae definition and report rationalization
· Ability to link required data to business rules, metrics, and validate formulae
· Understanding and development of project planning to the activity and task level
· Experience with building user acceptance test (UAT) cases, and leading UAT
· Comfortable with discussing business and industry issues with manager, director level and/or above customers
· Ability to project the importance of making and keeping commitments, in addition to a strong sense of urgency, follow through, high energy level, and self starter
· A strong understanding of the business benefits and impacts of Information Technology solutions that support the retail industry, along with the ability to articulate such benefits and impacts
· Ability to support the discovery, calculation and quantification of business impact and ROI
· Results oriented, whether quantitative or qualitative
· Client relationship building experience within the business and technology organizations of a retail company
· Proficient in MS Office product suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project)
· Strong research, analysis and mathematic skills
· Facilitation skills


Basic Qualifications:
· 3 years retail industry experience either by working directly in the US retail industry by working through a major consulting firm or a combination of both of working at a US retailer and a major consulting firm. This experience should be with General Merchandise or Food/Drug /Mass retailers. .
· Solving real world industry issues (merchandising, category management, advertising/marketing, supply chain, store operations and/or finance)
· Bachelor Degree, with Master's Degree preferred
· Business Consulting experience from a major consulting firm
· Ability to support an implementation project plan on time and budget

Preferred Qualifications:
· Understanding of data warehousing, business intelligence and logical data modeling principles and concepts
· Understanding of business intelligence reporting tools
· Master's Degree
· Assistant Buyer or Assistant Category Manager experience at a General Merchandising or Food/Drug Mass retailer
· Change management and/or business process consulting experience
· Ability to understand and interpret financial reports

*Our total compensation approach includes a competitive base salary, 401(k), strong work/family programs, and medical, dental and disability coverage. Teradata is an Equal Opportunity Employer.