Retail Merchandising and Planning – Strategy Manager

Retail Merchandising and Planning – Strategy Manager

We Are

Accenture's Retail Merchandising and Planning practice helps the world's leading retailers reinvent how they buy, plan, allocate, and manage product across the value chain. We work at the intersection of merchandising strategy, planning process design, and AI-enabled decision making, helping clients across apparel, hardlines, grocery, and specialty retail modernize their operating models and improve performance in demand forecasting, assortment planning, and inventory productivity.

You Are

A retail merchandising and planning professional who combines solid functional expertise with strong project leadership. You've spent your career close to the buy, whether in category management, merchandise financial planning, assortment, allocation, replenishment, or demand/supply planning, and you understand how these functions connect end-to-end. You translate that expertise into operating model recommendations, process improvements, and capability roadmaps clients can execute against. You are accountable to realizing value, and you have experience rolling up your sleeves to ensure high adoption of new processes and systems. You're equally comfortable leading a workstream, developing junior team members, and engaging with client stakeholders day to day.

The Work

As a Manager, you will lead key workstreams and projects within larger transformation engagements for retail clients, working closely with client stakeholders and Accenture leadership to shape recommendations, drive execution, and activate results.

Engagement Leadership

• Lead a workstream or project within a broader transformation program
• Coordinate delivery within your workstream, partnering with adjacent process, data/technology, and change management teams as needed
• Maintain day-to-day client relationships within your scope and escalate issues to engagement leadership as needed
• Ensure workstream quality and timeliness

Merchandising & Planning Transformation

• Support assessments of current-state merchandising, planning, and inventory management capabilities against industry-leading practices
• Contribute to future-state operating model design spanning category management, merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, allocation, replenishment, demand planning, and supply planning
• Develop components of capability strategies, transformation roadmaps, and value cases that quantify the impact of change
• Apply sub-industry nuance across apparel, hardlines, and/or grocery to tailor recommendations to client-specific dynamics

AI & Technology Enablement

• Bring current knowledge of AI, analytics, and emerging planning technologies to identify where they can solve merchandising and planning business problems
• Support clients in evaluating planning platforms and AI-enabled decision-making tools as part of broader transformation
• Contribute to the design and delivery of GenAI- and agentic-enabled planning capabilities where applicable to client roadmaps

Business Development & Practice Growth

• Contribute to proposal development, solutioning, and the broader business development cycle for consulting engagements
• Support the growth of the Retail Merchandising and Planning practice through asset development and community engagement
• Coach, mentor, and develop junior team members

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 791,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. Our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities.

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Originally posted on Himalayas