Description

Have you ever ordered a product on Amazon and wondered about the complex processes and systems running behind the scenes to power our operations? If so, this role is for you!

• Operations is at the heart of the Amazon customer experience. Each action we undertake is on behalf of our customers, and surpassing customer expectations is our passion.

• We improve customer experience by continuously optimizing the complex movements of goods from vendors and sellers to customers throughout Europe.

• Our operations teams are transversal centers of expertise, composed of engineers, analysts, scientists, technical program managers, and developers. We focus on defects reduction among the complex problems, operational processes, key tradeoffs, and critical decisions at Amazon.

• Defects Reduction connects with core operational organizations responsible for our fulfillment centers, internal and external transportation capabilities, customer returns, and finance teams. We obsess about our end-to-end supply chain to make it efficient, drive out defects for our customers, and continuously reduce waste from processes. Our overall mission is simple: we strive towards reaching zero defects across our end-to-end operations.

Key job responsibilities

Key job responsibilities

As the Senior Program Manager for Defects Reduction, you will establish and drive the Defects Reduction program initiatives across Amazon's European Operations. This role requires navigating highly complex, strategic scope across the end-to-end supply chain, understanding core operational activities, exposing defects and inefficiencies, surfacing tradeoffs between cost, customer experience, growth, and long-term profitability.

Collaborating closely with teams across EU Operations, including GCF, ATS, AMZL, and GTS, you will jointly identify and propose targets and levers to reduce the operational defects in our network. Your key focus will be to foster a unified, cross-functional approach, where teams work towards the optimal defect reduction aim. Navigating the conflicting priorities and trade-offs, you will play a crucial role in breaking down silos and facilitating a holistic, data-driven decision-making process.

This is an opportunity for an individual who thrives in a fast-paced environment. You will possess the energy, courage, and drive to drive strategic change and achieve ambitious goals using data-driven insights. The successful candidate will be a self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, with strong attention to detail, an ability to work in an ever-changing environment.

This role includes a balanced mix of stakeholder/program management (70%) and analytical activities (30%)

Stakeholder/Program management:

Develop and share insights with partner teams across supply chain, to influence the immediate defect reduction priorities, and build a 3-year roadmap of initiatives to reach zero defects across our end-to-end operations.

For complex and ambitious opportunities, design and launch pilots, build business cases, expose tradeoffs, show bottlenecks, highlight risks required to solve in order to maximize defect reduction impact.

For algorithmic opportunities, work with partner data science teams, software developers, and research scientists, to design and guide the next round of innovative solutions to drive large step change improvements.

Lead regular reviews with partner teams to monitor the progress of projects across the roadmap.

Consolidate progress into crisp and concise data-driven status updates. You will own reporting to Amazon senior leadership (SVP/VP-level).

Analytics:

Partner with business intelligence to develop, design, and execute actions based on advanced metrics & bridges that support the Defects Reduction program across operations from inbound, fulfillment, transportation, to customer returns.

Use data insights to improve complex processes across the entire supply chain, through working with partner operations and data science teams.

Perform detailed data set investigations, proactively identifying areas of opportunity, establishing a conceptual understanding of data sets across the wide variety of operational data sources.

A day in the life

• Work with fulfillment centers, transportation, finance, and retail teams across the world, to assess impactful defects, define and implement short and long-term improvement plans

• Coordinate the setting and propagation of targets for defects and cost reduction across the organization

• Collaborate with stakeholders across business and finance teams to develop plans for achieving these targets, securing necessary investments and technology commitments, and identifying key risks and opportunities

• Ensure smooth coordination and coherence between teams across the various organizations, managing timelines, meeting sequences, and aligning narratives

• Own the business documents and plans presented at the COO-level (multiple times a year), as well as all the intermediate materials leading up to these plans (VP and Director level documents)

• Work closely with ops and finance experts to combine and transform the plans into a set of network KPIs, ensuring we accurately reflected them in the financial models (P&L, cash flow, mix/rate)

About the team

Defects Reduction team works across operations, from inbound, fulfillment, transportation, to customer returns, and finance. We help drive defects reduction initiatives, balancing between customer experience, cost and operational process efficiency. The team has a large scope of impact and regularly interacts with leadership multiple levels above.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in supply chain, business, engineering, finance or related technical or quantitative field

• Experience in program or project management

• Knowledge of Excel at an intermediate level (e.g., pivot tables & charts, multiple criteria lookups, nested logical/IF formulas, data cleansing, array formulas, etc.)

• Experience owning program strategy, end-to-end delivery, and communicating results to senior leadership

• Experience working cross functionally with tech and non-tech teams

• Experience defining program requirements and using data and metrics to determine improvements

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in supply chain, business, engineering, finance or related technical or quantitative field

• Basic knowledge of SQL, Excel Macros, Tableau and other data visualization tools.

• Knowledge and certification for Operational Excellence / Continuous Improvement (Lean Six Sigma)

• Familiarity with supply chain management concepts - forecasting, planning, optimization, logistics gained through work experience or graduate level education.

Amazon is an equal opportunities employer. We believe passionately that employing a diverse workforce is central to our success. We make recruiting decisions based on your experience and skills. We value your passion to discover, invent, simplify and build. Protecting your privacy and the security of your data is a longstanding top priority for Amazon. Please consult our Privacy Notice (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/privacy_page) to know more about how we collect, use and transfer the personal data of our candidates.