Job Description

This role has three primary objectives: (1) Support supply chain monthly inventory analytics and planning process; (2) Design, analysis, and creation of the inventory strategy; and (3) Support Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and Integrated Tactical Planning (ITP) through Metrics and Analytics.  

Overview
Our vision for Eastman's IBP is to align our strategies and operational plans for meaningful results, including enhanced employee capabilities and processes, customer success, brand loyalty, and improved variable margin and working capital. Innovation remains the foundation for our success and is essential to our future. To succeed, we must accelerate our transformation to become a Leading Material Innovation Company.   This role supports two critical elements of the IBP and ITP vision through inventory strategy and analysis along with building a metric driven approach.   

Objectives & Responsibilities:

• Monthly inventory analysis and reporting
  • Conduct monthly analysis of inventory forecasts to assist the supply chain teams with variance analysis.
  • Improve / maintain PowerBI dashboards and cubes that support inventory analytics work.  
  • Support the development of inventory targets and reporting against those targets throughout the year. Inventory Steward for Working Capital and Free Cash Flow Meetings including presentation of forecasts and explanations for variances. 
  • Maintain supply chain product hierarchy to ensure data accuracy and completeness.
  • Ad-hoc analysis for supply chain leaders to determine the impact of business decisions on inventory.

Objectives and Responsibilities

• Inventory strategy development
  • Engage with business supply chain, product, and segment teams to develop a comprehensive value-chain driving inventory strategy supporting service, working capital, and cost targets.
  • Identify inventory optimization opportunities that can improve working capital position through analysis. 
  • Work with Eastman’s Operations Research group and Data Analytics team to develop and support inventory optimization models and frameworks.
  • Support master data settings related to inventory (i.e., safety stock, target stock, lot sizing).
  • Build insights from research into inventory strategy development and best practices.
  • Conduct benchmarking analysis for businesses against competitor inventory metric performance to help entitlement and competitive comparisons. 
  • Codify the inventory strategy into an approach document to use as the base document for continuous improvement efforts. 
  • Develop training and teaching curriculum to enable supply chain teams to build inventory strategy elements of the overall supply chain strategy. 
• IBP and ITP metrics and visualization
  • Work with IBP and ITP owners along with other Supply Chain COE and Commercial COE teams to develop relevant metrics. (e.g. inventory health, on-time delivery, adherence to schedule, BOM accuracy, etc)
  • Work with Eastman’s PowerBI team to build visualizations within PowerBI and ensure deployment success.  Continue to monitor and adjust utilizing an Agile approach. 
  • Become familiar with metric models (e.g., Gartner Metric hierarchy) to identify adjustments and modifications to existing metrics or new metrics for inclusion.  
  • Develop and maintain metric definitions and ensure alignment across all dashboards for consistency of measurement. 
  • Identify leading and predictive metrics that can be monitored proactively to enable faster decision making.  

Responsibilities

Technical:

• Intrinsic problem-solving skills with the ability to draw insights from data quickly, develop hypotheses, and rapidly iterate options using data and problem-solving frameworks such as Kepner-Tregoe, McKinsey Method, and 6σ.
• Critical thinking capabilities to enable clear focus, digging deeper into the 5 Why’s and the 7 So-What’s and focusing on the impactful elements.
• Strong content knowledge of IBP best practices and key metrics.
• Ability to build expertise in inventory strategy development.
• Optimization modeling / analytics expertise to design and facilitate practical inventory calculations.
• Ability to convey information and ideas to different audiences in a variety of situations.
• ERP experience required and knowledge of or ability to build knowledge of OMP Unison Planning will be extremely helpful in this role.  

Behavioral:

• Ability to create alternative perspectives using the underlying data and challenge with aspirational thought.
• Willingness to test the ‘status quo’ for inventory decisions through challenging hypothesis driven arguments supported by analysis. 
• Excellent communication and leadership skills.
• Results and outcome driven approach with a process mindset to institutionalize delivery.
• Ability to lead, coach, and inspire a direct team as well as influence indirectly.
• Ability to influence, break boundaries, and generate creative solutions with stakeholders.  

Qualifications

Education and/or Experience

• Bachelor’s degree required (Supply Chain, Industrial Engineering, Business Management, Engineering, Science, etc. preferred) 
• MBA or advanced degree strongly preferred. (Supply Chain, Business Analytics)
• 10+ years of experience within multiple functional areas. Product management, program management, supply chain, procurement, business management, IBP leader preferred.  Related areas of scientific analysis with research, design of experiments, hypothesis testing also considered relevant.  
• Experience working with outside consulting firms (Oliver Wight, Big 5, McKinsey & Company, etc.) is helpful in this role.