Sr Operations Research Analyst

Description

As our company slogan states, the Staples' Supply Chain is Making Things Happen for our customers every day through our network of more than 30 warehouses, 1200+ stores, and hundreds of delivery trucks. And even though we already operate the best supply chain in our industry, we need talented individuals like you to help us leverage advanced analytics and optimization algorithms to achieve breakthrough performance levels.

Position Summary

We are looking for a highly motivated problem solver who can leverage analytics to support business critical projects and key initiatives resulting in a significant, positive impact on Staples' bottom-line. The Operations Research analyst is responsible for working closely with key business partners to understand complex business processes, identify opportunities for improvement, propose executable solutions, build roadmaps for these initiatives and realize actionable results. The work requires conducting complex analyses, building tools and models while collaborating with external partners as well as multiple Staples functional teams. The scope of these initiatives would encompass multiple areas of Supply chain including, Transportation and Vehicle routing, Inventory Planning & control, Demand forecasting, Pricing and Markdown optimization.

Primary Responsibilities

• Take a data driven approach to identify and quantify opportunities to improve performance, cost efficiency and flexibility of the Staples supply chain network Identify and monitor key performance levers for important initiatives and ensure that we can exceed performance and cost targets
• Work closely with database developers and architects to build data models and develop a framework to enable a data driven problem solving environment
• Develop tools (reporting, visualization as well as planning) and deploy them for use by functional teams to support strategic and tactical initiatives
• Collaborate with research scientists to build advanced analytics models and support the development of optimization and machine learning based algorithms
• Work closely with functional teams such as supply chain strategy, field operations, process excellence, sales and finance to understand business challenges and drive solutions
• Work independently to deliver analytical projects and ad-hoc analyses including determining project scope, prioritizing requests, defining expected results, proposing execution plans, as well as target completion times
• Communicate status of milestones and results to executive leadership

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• MS in Industrial Engineering, Operations Research, Computer Science, Business Analytics, or any other quantitative field
• Experience with querying relational databases and strong expertise in SQL Familiarity with development toolsets such as Hadoop, MYSQL, Teradata, NOSQL
• Familiarity with programming languages such as python, C++, Java
• Familiarity with advanced analytics tool kits and BI tools such as Power BI
• Demonstrated analytical thinking, strategic problem solving capabilities
• Ability to communicate complex quantitative analysis in a clear, precise, and actionable manner

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with developing standalone decision support applications to support business planning or execution
• Experience building analytical models: optimization, statistical and machine learning Experience with financial modeling
• Experience with Supply Chain network design tools like Supply chain guru

Additional Requirements

• Ability to think big, manage ambiguity, move quickly and deliver results in an entrepreneurial environment
• Fearless but thoughtful in pursuit of results
• Flexible and resourceful, and easily adaptable to changes in environment and prioritization
• Possess excellent business judgment, and a practical, common-sense approach to getting things done

Staples