Volume Forecast Data Analyst

About Unilever 

Unilever is one of the world`s largest Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) businesses, with interest across Personal Care, Homecare, Refreshment and Foods product categories. We make products that people love – and that make a difference. Nutritious foods. Household care essentials. Indulgent ice creams. Refreshing teas. Luxurious shampoos. Affordable, disease-combating soaps... and many more. In fact, we make around 400 much-loved brands including global brands such as Knorr & Dove, but also local brand such as Calvé (the Netherlands) and Suave (the Americas). Shoppers buy them in more than 190 countries. That means you’ll find at least one of our products in seven out of ten households on the planet. And we want every one of those products to make a positive impact on the lives of the people who buy them. 

We want our business to flourish, and we know that our success depends on others flourishing around us. That's why our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace, and why sustainable, long-term growth is at the heart of our business model. 

Background

The Planning Excellence Benelux team consist of various roles that make Excellent Execution a success. One of these roles is the Volume Forecast Data Analyst. Less time spent on Running the Business to reinvest in Growing the Business whilst Improving Customer and Employee Satisfaction is the vision of Integrated operations. Team members within Planning Excellence embrace the vision and their daily work practice reflects the 4 principles of end-to-end ownership, maximized automation, one version of the truth and continuous improvement. The team effectively works in a cross-country setting, embracing cultural diversity and working in virtual teams.

Competencies key to make Integrated Operations a success, are:

• Practical creativity
• Enterprising behavior
• Ability to learn

Job Summary

The Volume Forecast Data Analyst has the responsibility for the full-term volume demand forecast per cluster for the Benelux. In this role, the Volume Forecast Data Analyst will contribute to the standard business process (S&OP), in close cooperation with the Value Forecast Analyst, Supply chain Specialists and Sales. 

This contains the responsibility for the total volume forecast over the Beauty and Personal  Care business category for a rolling horizon of 18 months. The main focus is on the horizon of 2 - 6 months providing the business with a robust rolling volume forecast using category market intelligence to translate the plans of sales/marketing and market dynamics into a volume forecast. This volume forecast is input for Unilever’s Supply Chain network to make production plans in the factories. The Volume Forecast Data Analyst is the driver of the demand volume forecast in the S&OP process (Business Forecast Process).

Further, within the Benelux, we are in a process of professionalizing our planning systems, building principles as artificial intelligence and machine learning into the planning process. The Volume Forecast Data Analyst will have a role in providing feedback on the outcome of these predictive models. Hence, some basic affinity with these principles combined with the ambition to be part of this journey, is important for the right candidate. Some scripting experience or affinity is a pre, in order to understand and easily communicate with partners and experienced data- scientist & engineers.

This results in an exciting balance between strategic planning, analysis, actions plans resulting from this, and stakeholder and business management. Strong relations are essential in this role.             

Demand Planning:

• Responsible for both base and promotional planning (0-18 months)
• Responsible for adjustments of the outcome of the promotional predictive model based on data analytics
• Responsible for KPI’s as Forecast Accuracy, Forecast Bias, exceptions and outliers 
• Integrate top-down forecast in bottom-up
• Manage volume exception driven by sales input in overall volume forecast
• Translate the innovation and relaunches forecast for the full horizon (0-18 months) in Unilever’s planning tools.
• Manage Assumptions, Risks and Opportunities & translate to volume impact
• Actively contribute to the improvement roadmap – both in execution as well as in proactively propose potential opportunities.
• Analyze datasets and the outcome of our predictive model

Business partnering:

• Establish and maintain strong relationships with Value Forecast Analyst, Supply chain Specialist, Sales, Trade Category Management, Brand Building, and Business Partners for forecast optimization purposes and perfect execution of product launches.
• Understand the dynamics of the business in order to communicate and distribute the correct information to the business (develop a high degree of business sense). 
• Report to the Category Planning Lead

Working on improvement Projects

• Help improving the predictive models by doing analysis on our forecast
• Start a project from scratch with a third parties/stakeholders/ consulting partner that will help the business to automate a certain process and save costs
• Build your own scripts that support teams, monitor the data quality in the systems or sends an automatic email to recipients that need to perform a task
• Visualize your projects with a visualization tool (e.g. PowerBI, Google Data Studio) to let the data speak and influence
• Know how to simplify processes and save time by doing so

Key Requirements

Skills and Experience

• A strong affinity with data & technology is a must
• It takes a mix of analytical thinking and creative business thinking to succeed
• Have a some affinity with new technology developments, machine learning methodologies and artificial intelligence is a pre
• Experience with scripting- and/or programming languages is a pre
• Know how to work with visualization tools like PowerBI, Google Data Studio or Tableau
• Have a basic understanding of databases
• Operational experience in either Supply Chain or Sales a pre
• Experience in the area of FMCG is preferred
• Languages: fluent in Dutch is a pre, English a must

Competencies:

• Practical creativity
• Analytical ability
• Enterprising behavior
• Influencing others
• Ability to learn
• Pro-active mindset
• Take ownership
• System thinking / dealing with complexity
• Critical thinking & problem solving
• Data-driven decision making

What do we offer:

Unilever is the place where you can be yourself and bring your purpose to life with the work that you do – creating a better business and a better world. We offer an exciting & dynamic work environment where you can make things happen. Furthermore, we offer some great reward and benefits! 

• Attractive total remuneration package; excellent company pension, bonus, share scheme
• Flexible cross-disciplinary career opportunities and a wealth of training opportunities & wellbeing resources whenever and wherever
• Plenty of company-paid holidays to further ensure your work-life balance is maintained 
• We encourage an inclusive culture, which comes to life with interchangeable public holidays, paid paternity leave of 6 weeks and our transgender policy 
• At the moment, we work from home. We will ensure you are well equipped for this. Once back to work, you can enjoy our tasty canteen with food prepped with own products
• Informal culture and being the first one trying our new products 

Disclaimer  

Equal Opportunity Employer: Unilever is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, or any other basis protected by applicable law, and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability. 

By highlighting the gender diversity at the workplace, Unilever encourages women equally men to apply. If you look for a job after a long career break or after any type of leave, do not hesitate to apply.