Primary Function:

The Global NPI (New Product Introduction) Operations team is responsible for governance, process compliance, and overall management of new product introduction processes, stakeholders, key metrics, and tools used to make business decisions in Grainger’s NPI Operations. The primary role of this team is to identify and execute operational solutions that serve critical business and assortment change needs for Grainger’s North America business units.

The primary role of this position is to serve as leads to the design and strategy for operational solutions and process improvement. Responsible for providing insights and business intelligence around NPI for Grainger’s North American business units. Designs & delivers solutions that translate operating metrics into critical insights that inform strategies, business decisions and recommendations. Considered the Subject-matter-expert to establish, communicate and execute a clear operational strategy for the business, ensuring it evolves over time to reflect the changing needs of the business, NPI Stakeholders, and Enterprise Solutions.

Principal Duties & Responsibilities:

• Function as a liaison working with stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.
• Provide proactive value added analysis, insights and recommendations that helps leaders establish priorities and set direction, aligning with overall company and department objectives.
• Understand business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements, recommends, and implements solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals. 
• Ability to use A3 Thinking to identify the tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to determine and assess proposed solutions to business problems. 
• System Development – Analysis work performed to review the current stated solutions used by an organization, to identify the issues, define the requirements, and suggest best possible solutions, in addition to configuration development and testing.
• Continuous Improvement – Analysis work to review current manual or workflow activities and tasks performed by people, functional areas, and systems, which are designed to achieve a specific outcome, while assuring data quality/integrity.
• Understands relationships, information exchanges/handoffs, procedures, policies, and observations of work performed to achieve specific outcomes. Within the context of the relationship with the business, assures alignment for continuous improvement within the systems landscape.
• Quickly build relationships and partner with management to provide solutions that will drive strategy and organizational vision to all functional areas in the business.
• Provide recommendations and lead discussions with leadership to understand business gaps in order to provide analytical solutions and implementation plans that includes a systemic component to reduce time spent on data mining or validating the integrity of data. 
• Document procedures and processes appropriately to build a library of solutions that future business units can leverage.

Preferred Education & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree required
• Minimum of 5 years working with product information management systems (e.g. STEP)
• Minimum of 5 years working with enterprise data warehouse systems (e.g. Teradata)
• Minimum of 5 years with emerging reporting tools and technologies (e.g. Tableau, BusinessObjects)
• Broad business knowledge and organizational awareness as well as an understanding of business operational drivers.
• Proven analytic and quantitative decision-making skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interface effectively with senior team members.
• The ability to influence decision-making processes without having specific authority.
• Must be technologically savvy in order to drive effective means of analyzing and reporting critical business information.
• This role requires leadership and guidance in operational matters and the need to communicate with all levels in the organization. A strong work ethic and results orientation is required to succeed in a fast paced, customer focused environment. Strong team skills are required in order to be effective in integrating solutions to support the business going forward.

Grainger is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, or protected veteran status.