Leads the growth of Nielsen’s capacity to promptly deliver high-quality, validated data to retail and manufacturing clients in North America, primarily Canada.• Develops strong working relationships with retailers to eliminate supplier data issues and improve quality metrics.• Collaborates with Nielsen’s partners to create short- and long-term plans to improve data input, data quality and on-time delivery.• Collaborates with other Nielsen teams, such as Product Leadership, IT Solutions and Retail Services to develop data requirements and standardize new product development in emerging market research areas, such as e-commerce, perishables and Total Store reporting.

Reporting to Senior Director, responsible for achieving national sales and profit targets for four beauty desks: Oral Care, Skin Care, Hand and Body Lotion and Sun Care, worth in excess of $200M in annual sales. Developed merchandising strategies to support and enhance the company directives within department. Leading a team of Merchants, developed strong relationships and key partnerships with vendors and provided direction on planning, pricing and assortment.• Negotiated product cost, created promotional programs and confirmed pricing strategies to support the financial objectives of the organization. • Utilizing Nielson data as well as other sources, researched and implemented key market trends into the category strategy.• Developed and rolled out planograms that were aligned to category strategy and ensured product assortment, sales margins and buying plans were aligned with budget.• Increased total sales by 7% in first year.• Managed store and warehouse inventory with supply chain, allocation analysts, and Buying-Customer support team.• Documented and managed product life cycle, aged inventory and exit strategy.

Designed and developed an inventory tracking and sales forecasting system that for the first time allowed visibility into store and item inventory levels for pre-determined sales programs. The implementation of this system with built in Retail Markdown Optimization functionality, allowed users to set individual retail item reductions by location and resulted in minimized gross profit erosion.• Documented and presented the system benefits with respect to sales and gross profit maximization and inventory management throughout the rollout phase to the senior management.• Created and implemented a training program with the Center of Employee Development and Training.• Established sales forecasting techniques using sales indexes, trend analysis, and multiple sales demand models as well as various statistical methods to determine optimal models to utilize in order to determine inventory stock out periods for each retail item and location.• Collaborated with IT to create specific data tables to determine inventory issues for all retail items and locations making it available for small groups using SAS Enterprise Guide.

Reported directly to the Sr. Vice President, lead the work take-out initiative through development of innovative business solutions which provided a superior, simplified and executable process to existing BU issues.• Designed and developed an Automated Replenishment system capable of determining optimal store specific item replenishment quantities based on past sales and future indexed projected demand. • Designed and developed a just-in-time forecasting/ordering system for Indoor floral, capable of analyzing sales trends on a continuous bases and automatically adjusting future store inventory requirements and orders.• Improved the productivity of inventory and the ability to maximize sales and profit in the BU.

Responsible for the creation of cohesive and detailed inventory plans and store distributions which aligned departmental sales targets for promotional and merchandising plans to optimal inventory requirements.• Developed and enhanced an Access based distribution system used to determine optimal store by store allocations/distributions based on category promotional and merchandising plans, store size and sales performance.• Directed and developed a team of planning analysts to work in partnership with category management and supply chain to achieve overall business goals.• Developed distribution strategies, inventory processes and analytics to provide consistent and effective reporting for the department.• Orchestrated the workflow between category management teams and supply chain operations to achieve all timelines and profit measures.• Generated top-level and in-depth financial information to support category teams and senior management with day-to-day and long-term decision making.• Constructed all flyer, merchandising and seasonal program inventory distribution plans that optimized sales, profitability and sell-through.• Decreased number of direct reports from 6 to 2 through efficiencies gained using new system. • Distribution model incorporated into newly designed planning system rolled out companywide to all merchant groups for the creation and execution of merchandising programs.

Responsible for achieving sales and profit targets for Canada for the Oral Care and Feminine Hygiene drugstore categories. Successful in increasing sales to over $160M through effective merchandising programs, vendor negotiations, SKU rationalization and the development and rolled out of new planograms.• Implemented strategic plans to grow market share. Successful in increasing market share for Kids toothbrushes to number one.• Developed new merchandising tool that allowed for ad preplans and ad grids templates to be populated automatically with anticipated sales and dead net profit. This tool decreased the time required to create these templates from hours to minutes. • Analyzed Nielsen Market information and utilized this data to make informed category strategy decisions.• Prepared and presented comprehensive category reviews to senior management.

Designed and developed two financial reporting systems for the newly created Central Reporting Group.• Weekly Profit & Loss reporting system which allowed for the financial P&L performance of the Ontario banners to be monitored weekly as a period progressed more effectively. This system allowed the company to be more proactive and responsive with changes to merchandising or strategic plans in order to realize period targets.• Weekly Ad Economics Reporting System which connected the entire Ontario Food merchandising department into one central database system combined with actual total sales, ad sales and GP to create an ad economics performance reporting system.

Responsible for the creation and rollout of a retail budgeting system which allowed users to easily budget store department contribution including: sales, shrink and other income.

Developed standardized P&L reports used to review store performance within all areas of merchandising and operations. Spearheaded the 2004 & 2005 store budgeting process for NGR through the design, development and implementation of a new MS Access based budgeting system. Updated store standards manual and created a check list that stores used in order to ensure they followed merchandising direction.• Accountable for General Merchandise (GM) department financial contribution including: sales, front end gross profit, labour, supplies and inventory shrink. • Worked with category management teams to develop plans for realizing sales and profit opportunities.• Acted as primary contact and consultant for franchised National Grocers Retail (NGR) stores with regards to GM merchandising, ad accuracy and other inquiries as they occurred.• Liaised with national store operations groups on a weekly basis through conference calls and quarterly operations meetings.• Provided analysis-based feedback to newly opened and renovated stores.• Created and communicated new department operating standards including: best practices for displays, layouts, ordering and managing shrink.

Responsible for achieving sales and profit targets through the creation and execution of promotional advertising plans, merchandising plans and planograms for several key grocery categories within Loblaw franchise banners in Ontario.• Developed and rolled out NGR’s first standardized planograms for several key grocery categories.• Developed and rolled out several centralized NGR specific sales reporting tools to assist merchandisers with deep-dive analysis.