The Amazon South Africa Retail business is looking for a leader with proven experience to drive process improvements and thought leadership in inventory planning and operations.

The Strategic Supply Chain Manager will be responsible for leading inventory management strategies to maximize customer experience, sales, margin and turns, as well as end-to-end business ownership of all supply chain processes from manufacturer to consumer. They will use data to influence others and build scalable systems & processes, rather than just addressing single issues. They will play a critical role in delivering the optimal customer experience by ensuring we have the right product quantities, in the right places, at the right time. To achieve this mission, Supply Chain Managers work to continuously optimize our end-to-end supply chain by engaging with vendors to improve operational metrics and driving system and process automation with internal teams.

The successful candidate must be highly organized and possess strong data extraction and analytical capabilities. They are able to self-manage competing priorities, driving both strategic and tactical activities and parallel, and possess strong written and verbal communication skills. Strong candidates will have knowledge in fundamental business principles and previous relevant experience. The ideal candidate is able to lead and influence both internal and external teams in an ambiguous environment while maintaining a customer-centric philosophy.

Key job responsibilities

Design, build and own recurring supply-chain mechanisms end to end, defining how a problem is measured, who is accountable, and how performance is scored over time, rather than only monitoring metrics and resolving individual issues.

Building internal tooling and products (increasingly leveraging AI tooling) to automate analysis and scale decision-making, partnering with product, program and engineering teams to deliver them.

Act as single-threaded owner for the processes in scope, including authoring the recurring leadership communications and documentation that go with them.

Lead and influence cross-functional partners, buying, vendor management, availability, finance, central forecasting/planning, and product/program teams, to change how those teams operate.

Extract, model and interrogate large, imperfect data sets and translate them into leadership-ready narratives with clear, sized recommendations.

Identify opportunities to optimize our supply chain cost structure and profitability through vendor engagement, project management, and collaboration with partner teams on system improvements.