Sr Director Merchandise Transformation

Ulta Beauty, Inc.•Bolingbrook, IL

About The Position

Ulta Beauty is in the midst of a significant, multi-year project that will transform and modernize the merchandising processes and technology. The end-to-end process will encompass planning, pricing, assortments, forecasting, inventory management, and space planning. The key goals are to (1) to optimize the right product in the right place at the right time (2) accelerate the business by standardizing and automating new systems and workflows to respond to trends more quickly (3) embrace advanced analytics and AI to elevate decision quality and visibility across the end-to-end process. The Sr. Director is a key leadership role within the organization. This role will report to the SVP of Merchandise Planning and Operations, and work closely with the Transformation Office and the most senior members of Ulta Beauty’s organization to lead the user-side implementations, drive desired business outcomes, and shape our future ways of working with a focus on consumer and business value. This role will have the overall accountability for the successful adoption of the multi-year project, inclusive of delivering long-term value and within budget.

Requirements

Senior strategic leader within the retail industry, has 15+ years of relevant industry experience
Experience leading and executing transformation across multiple functions
This leader should have the experience and intuition needed to serve as a highly visible, collaborative advisor and facilitator to management teams and other stakeholders.
Deep functional expertise in inventory, planning, buying or related discipline
An enterprise-thinker and exceptional problem solver
Highly collaborative approach
Value creation, Business case delivery
Process engineering mind-set
Results-oriented and strong accountability
Strong cross-functional leadership and facilitation skills
Powerful and effective communication and influence capabilities
Proven leadership experience, including the ability to transform organizations while leading broad adoption
High degree of analytical horsepower, understanding sales and inventory cost trade-offs and creative problem solving.

Responsibilities

Efficiently leverage project resources, mitigating risk, removing obstacles, prioritizing and assigning work, and driving accountability across the project team, SMEs, and multi-functional leads.
Continue to define and implement the transformation roadmap, aligning business strategies (e.g., omni-channel inventory complexity) with technology capabilities.
Work closely with leaders across functional workstreams- Merchandising, Planning, Finance, Supply Chain, Field, Omni, Technology, Transformation office, enterprise support teams, and key software and consultant partners to create and execute strategies to deliver transformational use cases aligned to value. Partner with senior management to ideate, evaluate, prioritize, and execute initiatives and work cross-functionally to gain alignment across multiple stakeholders that may have different priorities.
Work with Finance, Technology, and Transformation office to manage and track budget for all included programs and workstreams, collaborating on business case development. Ensure funds are appropriately assigned and effectively utilized to deliver the project roadmap on-time and capture value.
Monitors end-to-end process design and deployment to achieve key goals: automation, responsiveness, accuracy, AI deployment, scalability.
Ensure project governance practices are followed, such as managing the project scope, delivery roadmap, change request process, funding model, reporting/communicating transparently across key stakeholders, and following a disciplined decision-making and prioritization process.
Lead upward communication and materials preparation, providing transparency to key stakeholders, the Executive Leadership Team, and Board of Directors to ensure proper strategic alignment and secure support where necessary.
Manage user group and partner with IT to manage configuration options, testing, and managing the UAT (User Acceptance Testing) process.
Drive the adoption of new tools and processes by building "super user" networks, conducting training, creating playbooks, and performing change impact assessments. Partner with Change Management team on communication and monitoring adoption.
Define and monitor KPIs as established in the business case (e.g., inventory turns, plan forecast accuracy) to identify process gaps and build sprint release plans in partnership with IT.