Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Affiliations
Timeline
Generic

Rob Price

Nixa,MO

Summary

Senior Executive with over 22 years of successful experience in Retail and Merchandising. Recognized consistently for performance excellence and contributions to success in retail industry. Strengths in P&L management and Data Science backed by training in Advanced Analytics. Strategic-thinking individual experienced in turning low-performing organizations into top revenue producers. Offering engaging and pleasant personality with expertise improving customer relationships.

Overview

18
18
years of professional experience

Work History

Executive Director Strategic Accounts

Brain Corps
08.2024 - Current
  • Spearheads strategic account management for Walmart and Sam's Club, fostering robust client relationships and delivering sustained value through robotics solutions to enhance operational efficiencies.
  • Successfully negotiated and finalized a multi-year contract, securing long-term partnerships and driving revenue growth by aligning robotics initiatives with customer goals.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally with Walmart and Sam's Club teams, including operations, product development, software engineering, and facilities to ensure seamless integration and optimization of robotics solutions across retail environments.
  • Partnered with internal teams, including product development, software engineering, and operations to support tailored solutions, address customer needs, and prioritize features for continuous product improvement.
  • Direct quarterly business reviews (QBR's) and regular strategy sessions to align on roadmap initiatives, gather customer feedback, and proactively address operational or deployment challenges.
  • Drive KPI tracking and reporting to measure the effectiveness of solutions, provide actionable insights for both internal and external stakeholders to enhance customer satisfaction and performance.
  • Act as the primary escalation point for account-related issues, effectively managing risks and ensuring timely resolution to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and engagement.

Chief of Analytics & Merchandise Operations

Bass Pro Shops / Cabela’s
02.2021 - 01.2024
  • Led corporate functions for Analytics, Merchandise Financial Planning, and Space & Assortment Optimization
  • Collaborated with senior management to develop strategic initiatives and long term goals.
  • Directed design and execution of business transformation initiatives to drive performance, profit optimization and growth opportunities, as well as analytics function to offer prescriptive, action-based analytics.
  • Designed and implemented assortment & space analytics optimization delivering incremental sales in excess of $200M annually, +$80M in annual profitability, & a reduction in inventory of 120bps
  • Created Pricing Analytics function focused on base price, promotional price, and markdown optimization delivering incremental sales of +$100M annually in key categories, while delivering incremental profits of +$30M.
  • Led Cost Negotiation Process post COVID, which reduced COGS across the company by over $100M annually.
  • Led end to end budget process across the company , managing over $7B in revenue
  • Rebuilt space planning function to deliver optimal allocation of space across all spectrums of space from total store, to department, to the items on a shelf, resulting in highest performing sales per square foot in the company.
  • Identified opportunities to improve business process flows and productivity.
  • Established performance goals for department and provided methods for reaching milestones.
  • Managed financial, operational and human resources to optimize business performance.
  • Analyzed industry trends and tracked competitor activities to inform decision making for merchandise strategy and budgets.
  • Increased company growth through collaboration with sales and marketing departments focused optimized marketing channel spend and personalization.
  • Maintained P&L and shouldered corporate fiscal responsibility leading the budgeting, forecasting, and gap closure process.
  • Initiated strategy to drive company growth and increase market share and profitability across new segments of business to include retail, manufacturing and hospitality.

Sr Director Data Science & Software Engineering

Walmart International
01.2016 - 02.2021
  • Advanced Analytics Solutioning – Create solutions and lead a team of data scientists aimed at leveraging internal, as well as external data to build analytical models in order to advance business capabilities and automate business processes and decisioning leveraging machine learning and AI
  • Strategic Development – Responsible for collaborating with cross functional business partners across multiple geographies to assess gaps in capabilities, as well as identify market trends in order to align data science capabilities to business needs and transform through new technologies developed by software engineering resources.
  • Shopper Marketing & Insights – Developed insights from analytics to understand customer behavior through customer decision tree’s, item loyalty, item substitutability, demand transference, promotional effectiveness, and marketing effectiveness to improve ROI on marketing, labor, and assortment decisions
  • Implementation & Program Delivery – Responsible for jointly collaborating with business and technology partners in multiple geographies in an effort to implement newly created technologies in agile delivery methodology.
  • Executive Communication – Responsible for owning relationships with Chief Merchandising and Chief Technology Officer partners across markets within International business and ensuring product roadmaps were aligned to business needs and expected timelines.
  • People Development – built, developed and led cross functional team of 100 Walmart associates and 100 vendor partners across U.S., Mexico, and India
  • Budget Management - oversaw $30M budget for developed of key capabilities aimed to infuse analytics into software products in merchandising including: assortment optimization, space optimization, pricing - base price, promotional pricing and markdown optimization, & cost analytics

Sr Director Global Business Processes & Analytics

Walmart International
08.2014 - 01.2016
  • Business Development – Responsible for building capabilities, as well as subject matter expertise within Global Business Process organization aimed at advancing business’ capabilities in people, processes, and technology related to merchandising initiatives. Responsible for working internally and externally with business leaders to forge relationships and stay informed of current industry best practices around the globe.
  • Strategic Development – Responsible for building and maintaining annual operating plans for various merchandising functions to include 3-year road map, capability needs, resource requirements, and key business partners. Also responsible for the design, development & deployment of strategies involving complex business challenges.
  • Executive Communication – Responsible for owning relationships with country Chief Merchandising Officers and ensuring strategic alignment of business objectives. Maintain regular business updates as needed within the scope of various change management initiatives.
  • Change Management – Responsible for providing repeatable, executable business solutions related to various merchandising initiatives across the globe. Responsible for building and maintaining business maturity curves used to assess business’ current capabilities and build strategies to bridge the gap between current state and future desired state.
  • Internal Consultant – Responsible for evaluating “as is” processes and capabilities, while working with the business to provide strategic roadmap designed to advance capabilities while infusing customer analytics at the core of the decision making process.

Sr Director Merch Planning / Business Analytics

Walmart U.S.
02.2007 - 08.2014
  • Associate Development – Assess talent strengths and opportunities within organization in order to build effective training plans for team to ensure training objectives are aligned with organizational goals and needs. Identify and Develop Talent within organization in order to better leverage resources and allow for succession planning. Manage roles, responsibilities, and opportunities to better maximize organizational performance.
  • Financial Accountability – Utilize Category Level performance metrics to ensure Department Level financial budget metrics are attained. Work with cross-functional team to ensure projections are accurate and identify gaps in the budget to help narrow and eliminate and gaps. Develop tactics and strategies aimed at delivering financial metrics outlined within the departmental budget.
  • Budget – Responsible to leverage market data & CAGR to provide annual sales, profit, and inventory targets for $12B business across multiple categories and departments, as well as forecast anticipated market category share gains
  • Judgment – using relevant business metrics, analyses, and reports to measure, monitor, and improve performance.
  • Influence – collaborate with key stakeholders in order to better align around business objectives and communicate priorities, initiatives, and organizational information.
  • Directed design and execution of business transformation initiatives to drive performance, profit optimization and growth opportunities.

Education

MBA -

University of Phoenix
Tempe, AZ
08.2011

Bachelor of Science - Criminal Justice

Missouri Southern State University
Joplin, MO
05.2003

Advanced Analytics Certificate -

American Public University System
Charles Town, WV
2016

Design Thinking Certificate -

Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
2020

Skills

  • Data Analytics
  • Retail Merchandising & Financial Planning
  • Space & Assortment Optimization
  • Sales Planning
  • People Development
  • Shopper Marketing
  • Forecasting & Budgeting
  • P&L management

Affiliations

  • Retail Analytics Council - Northwestern University
  • Data Science Advisory Board - Oklahoma State University

Timeline

Executive Director Strategic Accounts

Brain Corps
08.2024 - Current

Chief of Analytics & Merchandise Operations

Bass Pro Shops / Cabela’s
02.2021 - 01.2024

Sr Director Data Science & Software Engineering

Walmart International
01.2016 - 02.2021

Sr Director Global Business Processes & Analytics

Walmart International
08.2014 - 01.2016

Sr Director Merch Planning / Business Analytics

Walmart U.S.
02.2007 - 08.2014

MBA -

University of Phoenix

Bachelor of Science - Criminal Justice

Missouri Southern State University

Advanced Analytics Certificate -

American Public University System

Design Thinking Certificate -

Cornell University

Similar Profiles

CREATE PROFILE
Rob Price