Purchasing Analyst

AMain.com, Inc.•Chico, CA

About The Position

The Purchasing Analyst is the analytical engine of the buying organization, translating vendor performance, replenishment-system signals, demand velocity, and inventory health into the audits, action lists, and standard operating procedures that drive purchasing decisions across the company’s business units and channels. The role typically supports a Buyer team managing [X] suppliers, [$YYM] of active inventory, and [Z] SKUs across [N] business units. This role exists to absorb the investigation work that today bottlenecks Buyers — the diagnosis of why service levels are slipping, why a category is overstocked, why the system is underordering — and to deliver back to Buyers and managers a short, pre-sorted list of items that need attention, the cause, and the suggested action. The Analyst contributes to the shift from intuition-based buying to a disciplined, forecast-led model and supports pre-season, in-season, and post-season planning cadences for seasonal categories. The Analyst absorbs investigation work so Buyers don’t have to. Raw data dumps and weekly reports are not the deliverable — a pre-sorted action list is. Each recurring audit should produce a short list of items that need attention, the diagnosed cause, and a suggested action. The Analyst flags; the manager decides and executes; the Buyer is consulted where their knowledge is required, but never bottlenecked by the analytics workload. Where a recurring pattern emerges, the Analyst codifies it into an SOP that strengthens future buying decisions.

Requirements

2-5 years of experience in purchasing, supply chain analytics, inventory planning, replenishment, or a comparable analytical role.
Advanced Excel skills (pivots, lookups, conditional logic, structured workbooks) with fluency in building clean, maintainable models.
Demonstrated ability to translate raw data into clear, decision-ready action lists for non-analyst audiences.
Comfort working across multiple business units, channels, or categories with different vendor bases and inventory profiles.

Nice To Haves

Proficiency in SQL & Power BI.
Bachelor’s degree in supply chain, business, finance, economics, analytics, or equivalent professional experience.
Background in retail, distribution, or multi-channel e-commerce environments.
APICS/ASCM (CPIM, CSCP) or ISM (CPSM) certification or progress toward.
Familiarity with demand-planning software.
Detail-oriented and process-minded; obsessive about turning one-off analyses into repeatable processes and reports.
Strong written and verbal communication; able to present clearly to Buyers, leadership, and suppliers.
Curious and collaborative; comfortable pushing back on assumptions with data and tact.
Thrives in a fast-changing environment where the process is being built rather than inherited.
Working understanding of GMROI, in-stock rate, turn, fill rate, demand-system parameters, and other core inventory metrics.
Bias toward shipping an imperfect first version and iterating, vs. waiting for a perfect dataset.

Responsibilities

Maintain a rolling view of supplier lead-time performance; produce a list of suppliers with repeated lead-time slippage as conversation starters for Category and Brand Managers ahead of supplier meetings.
Cross-reference replenishment safety-stock or days-of-stock parameters against actual lead times, service levels, and lost-sales exposure. Recommend input adjustments by supplier; surface buyer deviations and the reason behind them.
Monthly reconciliation of aged backorders; produce an aging table by dollars and months. Maintain company-side vs. supplier-side backorder views and drive resolution of mismatches.
Recurring report of discontinued SKUs still on order; prevents stale inventory from reappearing after clearance imports or category exits.
Build and maintain supplier scorecards covering lead time, fill rate, on-time delivery, backorder exposure, defect/return rate, and chargebacks.
Prepare data packs for monthly top-supplier check-ins and quarterly business reviews.
Build the data foundation for vendor negotiations — spend, volume, lead-time history, scorecard performance, market benchmarks — so Category Managers, Brand Managers, and Supply Chain leadership can negotiate from evidence rather than anecdote.
Identify and quantify cost-savings opportunities (cost reductions, term improvements, freight, packaging, MOQs) and track realized savings against plan.
Flag products selling faster than anticipated so Buyers can act before stockout. Equally, flag sharp velocity drops with diagnosed cause — pricing change, competitor move, or lifecycle decay.
Monthly review of new-product landings: what came in too heavy, what came in too light. Build SOP launch quantities by category and price point; track deviations and outcomes to evolve the SOP over time.
Recurring audit of the replenishment-system demand parameters (e.g., max-demand-count, demand caps, smoothing constants) that suppress signal when miscalibrated and drive chronic underordering. Track “lost demand” as the gap between units sold and units the system registered.
Track forecast accuracy by supplier and category; feed misses back into the forecasting and new-product processes.
Own the service-level / in-stock dashboard at the company, BU, category, and buyer levels; track progress against targets and pinpoint the SKUs and categories holding the system back.
Maintain a weekly top-revenue OOS list and partner with Buyers to expedite, substitute, or relocate inventory.
Top-impact report on min-stock placement across distribution centers as velocity shifts. Surface where placement was changed historically so the reason can be revalidated.
Flag SKUs whose margin after shipping costs falls below the threshold for pricing adjustment or discontinuation review.
Convert overstock reports into action lists — markdown-eligible, vendor-return, channel-liquidation, or alternative-channel-eligible — rather than asking Buyers to parse raw lists.
Track GMROI and inventory turn by category and BU against corporate targets; flag categories trending below threshold.
Identify SKUs with cross-DC imbalance and prepare rebalancing orders to reduce cross-shipping costs.
Support pre-season planning (forecast, buy quantities, OTB), in-season management (re-orders, markdowns, allocation), and post-season analysis (sell-through, GM, learnings) for seasonal categories.
Convert every recurring audit into a short, pre-sorted list of items that need attention, the diagnosed cause, and the recommended action. The goal is a manageable action list, not raw rows.
Route action lists to the appropriate manager for decision and execution; consult Buyers where their knowledge is required without making them the default routing path.
Where a recurring pattern is found (lead-time ranges, new-product quantities by category/price, demand-parameter defaults, ship-cost by size/weight), codify it into a Buyer SOP and evolve it as deviations are tested.
Build the analytics scaffolding that allow new Buyers to ramp up quickly.
Assist Buyers with pricing reviews, MAP/promotion compliance, and dealer-pricing checks where data preparation accelerates the decision.
Own the weekly Purchasing data packet that feeds the operations meeting and supply chain leadership review — service level, OOS, lead time, backorder, destock progress.
Work with the Reporting/BI team to instrument and maintain core purchasing and inventory KPIs in shared dashboards.
Respond to requests from Buyers, Merchandising, Sales, Finance, and Executive leadership with quick, well-sourced answers.
Drive item-master and vendor-data hygiene — costs, lead times, vendor mappings, supplier alternates, demand-parameter defaults — so downstream reporting can be trusted.
Serve as the analytical right hand to Buyers across all business units.
Equip Category and Brand Managers with supplier lead-time evidence and backorder data ahead of supplier conversations.
Coordinate with Merchandising on category-level inventory implications, OOS timing, and merchandising handoffs.
Translate field-level demand signals into buying input for Sales.
Partner with Finance and Operations on PO accruals, receiving accuracy, and inventory valuation.
Support replenishment analytics for store-level and partner allocation processes for Stores / Retail Partners.