Andrew is a Merchandise Planner for Target, the retail giant. Andrew’s role revolves around financial scenario planning when Target is deciding whether or not to bring in new inventory. He works side-by-side with buyers and inventory managers to objectively forecast necessary inventory levels to support upcoming sales using the previous month and year as data points.
Transcript
My name is Andrew Rice. I am a Merchandise Planner at Target, supporting the frozen pizza, desserts and ice cream category. I would say that the foundational groundwork of what we do is financial scenario planning. So really an objective voice in the organization. And it's a new part of the organization that was stood up back in July. So how we work as a total cohesive unit is you have a plan or a buyer and an inventory analyst. So really, whenever we make any kind of inventory decision or any type of merchandising decision. So, new items or whatnot, we basically say yes or no, this is a good or bad idea based off of just facts. We try to root everything we do in facts and numbers. I think one thing that we're always doing is forecasts. So, it's a process we go through once a month. It's basically saying, based off of everything we know from what just happened in the last month, what do we think the next, call it, two months, six months, full year's gonna look like? And again, it roots itself in financial assumptions, any kind of business disruption we see in the future and it can really be a number of things. It can be really simple in terms of we just wanna know what sales are gonna look like in the future or it can be a lot more complex in saying, hey, what do we think if this happens to sales? What's the profit picture gonna look like? What kind of inventory do we need to support those sales? Outside of that, what kind of vendor reliability issues that we maybe have? That's gonna drive us to maybe think, yes or no, we can support those sales, because of course, simple things. If you don't have product, you can't make your sales. It's one of those jobs that, within my entire team, I'm for sure, one of the younger ones I would say in planning and I get my job done in eight to five if I want. I like to come in early, I like to stay late. I enjoy what I do. You got people that are married and have kids and they can do their job from 8:30 to 4 just fine. So, it's one of those things that's not a big time suck if you don't want it to be. But in terms of how busy a week can be, it can be one of those things that you're gonna put in 30, 35 hours and your jobs gonna be satisfactorily done if not better. And just some weeks it can take up to 50 hours and that's just kind of a culmination of multiple things going at once.
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