Purchasing Analyst

JOB TITLE: Purchasing Analyst

Department: Supply Chain / Purchasing

Reports To: Director of Supply Chain (or equivalent)

Direct Reports: None

FLSA: Exempt

SUMMARY

The Purchasing Analyst is the analytical engine of the buying organization, translating vendor performance, replenishment-system signals, demand velocity, and inventory health into the audits, action lists, and standard operating procedures that drive purchasing decisions across the company’s business units and channels. The role typically supports a Buyer team managing [X] suppliers, [$YYM] of active inventory, and [Z] SKUs across [N] business units. This role exists to absorb the investigation work that today bottlenecks Buyers — the diagnosis of why service levels are slipping, why a category is overstocked, why the system is underordering — and to deliver back to Buyers and managers a short, pre-sorted list of items that need attention, the cause, and the suggested action. The Analyst contributes to the shift from intuition-based buying to a disciplined, forecast-led model and supports pre-season, in-season, and post-season planning cadences for seasonal categories.

OPERATING APPROACH

The Analyst absorbs investigation work so Buyers don’t have to. Raw data dumps and weekly reports are not the deliverable — a pre-sorted action list is. Each recurring audit should produce a short list of items that need attention, the diagnosed cause, and a suggested action. The Analyst flags; the manager decides and executes; the Buyer is consulted where their knowledge is required, but never bottlenecked by the analytics workload. Where a recurring pattern emerges, the Analyst codifies it into an SOP that strengthens future buying decisions.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

1. VENDOR, SUPPLIER & PO PERFORMANCE

• Supplier lead-time tracking: Maintain a rolling view of supplier lead-time performance; produce a list of suppliers with repeated lead-time slippage as conversation starters for Category and Brand Managers ahead of supplier meetings.
• Days-of-Stock / safety-stock audit: Cross-reference replenishment safety-stock or days-of-stock parameters against actual lead times, service levels, and lost-sales exposure. Recommend input adjustments by supplier; surface buyer deviations and the reason behind them.
• Backorder health: Monthly reconciliation of aged backorders; produce an aging table by dollars and months. Maintain company-side vs. supplier-side backorder views and drive resolution of mismatches.
• Discontinued product on-order: Recurring report of discontinued SKUs still on order; prevents stale inventory from reappearing after clearance imports or category exits.
• Vendor scorecards: Build and maintain supplier scorecards covering lead time, fill rate, on-time delivery, backorder exposure, defect/return rate, and chargebacks.
• Vendor review prep: Prepare data packs for monthly top-supplier check-ins and quarterly business reviews.
• Negotiation support: Build the data foundation for vendor negotiations — spend, volume, lead-time history, scorecard performance, market benchmarks — so Category Managers, Brand Managers, and Supply Chain leadership can negotiate from evidence rather than anecdote.
• Cost-savings tracking: Identify and quantify cost-savings opportunities (cost reductions, term improvements, freight, packaging, MOQs) and track realized savings against plan.=

2. DEMAND, VELOCITY & SYSTEM PARAMETERS

• Velocity change monitoring: Flag products selling faster than anticipated so Buyers can act before stockout. Equally, flag sharp velocity drops with diagnosed cause — pricing change, competitor move, or lifecycle decay.
• New-product benchmarking: Monthly review of new-product landings: what came in too heavy, what came in too light. Build SOP launch quantities by category and price point; track deviations and outcomes to evolve the SOP over time.
• Demand-parameter audit: Recurring audit of the replenishment-system demand parameters (e.g., max-demand-count, demand caps, smoothing constants) that suppress signal when miscalibrated and drive chronic underordering. Track “lost demand” as the gap between units sold and units the system registered.
• Forecast accuracy: Track forecast accuracy by supplier and category; feed misses back into the forecasting and new-product processes.

3. INVENTORY HEALTH & PLACEMENT

• Service-level / in-stock dashboard: Own the service-level / in-stock dashboard at the company, BU, category, and buyer levels; track progress against targets and pinpoint the SKUs and categories holding the system back.
• Top-revenue out-of-stock list: Maintain a weekly top-revenue OOS list and partner with Buyers to expedite, substitute, or relocate inventory.
• Min-stock / placement audit: Top-impact report on min-stock placement across distribution centers as velocity shifts. Surface where placement was changed historically so the reason can be revalidated.
• Margin / cost-to-ship check: Flag SKUs whose margin after shipping costs falls below the threshold for pricing adjustment or discontinuation review. 
• Overstock action lists: Convert overstock reports into action lists — markdown-eligible, vendor-return, channel-liquidation, or alternative-channel-eligible — rather than asking Buyers to parse raw lists.
• GMROI and turn: Track GMROI and inventory turn by category and BU against corporate targets; flag categories trending below threshold.
• Warehouse rebalancing: Identify SKUs with cross-DC imbalance and prepare rebalancing orders to reduce cross-shipping costs.
• Seasonal planning cadence: Support pre-season planning (forecast, buy quantities, OTB), in-season management (re-orders, markdowns, allocation), and post-season analysis (sell-through, GM, learnings) for seasonal categories.

4. ACTION-LIST DELIVERY & BUYER ENABLEMENT

• Action lists, not data dumps: Convert every recurring audit into a short, pre-sorted list of items that need attention, the diagnosed cause, and the recommended action. The goal is a manageable action list, not raw rows.
• Manager-first routing: Route action lists to the appropriate manager for decision and execution; consult Buyers where their knowledge is required without making them the default routing path.
• SOP codification: Where a recurring pattern is found (lead-time ranges, new-product quantities by category/price, demand-parameter defaults, ship-cost by size/weight), codify it into a Buyer SOP and evolve it as deviations are tested.
• Buyer onboarding: Build the analytics scaffolding that allow new Buyers to ramp up quickly.
• Pricing and policy support: Assist Buyers with pricing reviews, MAP/promotion compliance, and dealer-pricing checks where data preparation accelerates the decision.

5. REPORTING, DASHBOARDS & DATA QUALITY

• Operating cadence: Own the weekly Purchasing data packet that feeds the operations meeting and supply chain leadership review — service level, OOS, lead time, backorder, destock progress.
• Dashboard partnership: Work with the Reporting/BI team to instrument and maintain core purchasing and inventory KPIs in shared dashboards.
• Ad-hoc analysis: Respond to requests from Buyers, Merchandising, Sales, Finance, and Executive leadership with quick, well-sourced answers.
• Data quality: Drive item-master and vendor-data hygiene — costs, lead times, vendor mappings, supplier alternates, demand-parameter defaults — so downstream reporting can be trusted.

6. CROSS-FUNCTIONAL PARTNERSHIP

• Buyer team: Serve as the analytical right hand to Buyers across all business units.
• Category and Brand Managers: Equip them with supplier lead-time evidence and backorder data ahead of supplier conversations.
• Merchandising: Coordinate on category-level inventory implications, OOS timing, and merchandising handoffs.
• Sales: Translate field-level demand signals into buying input.
• Finance and Operations: Partner on PO accruals, receiving accuracy, and inventory valuation.
• Stores / Retail Partners: Support replenishment analytics for store-level and partner allocation processes.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

• On-time delivery and accuracy of the weekly Purchasing data packet.
• Vendor scorecard coverage across the top suppliers and active adoption by Buyers.
• Service-level / in-stock rate progression toward targets.
• Inventory turn progression toward corporate targets.
• Reduction in dollar overstock and aged-inventory exposure.
• Lead-time variance (actual vs. system) trending toward zero.
• Backorder reconciliation cycle time (company-side vs. supplier-side).
• Recurring audits converted from raw data into pre-sorted action lists; % of flagged items closed.
• Forecast accuracy progression by supplier and category.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE

• 2-5 years of experience in purchasing, supply chain analytics, inventory planning, replenishment, or a comparable analytical role.
• Advanced Excel skills (pivots, lookups, conditional logic, structured workbooks) with fluency in building clean, maintainable models.
• Demonstrated ability to translate raw data into clear, decision-ready action lists for non-analyst audiences.
• Comfort working across multiple business units, channels, or categories with different vendor bases and inventory profiles.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Proficiency in SQL & Power BI.
• Bachelor’s degree in supply chain, business, finance, economics, analytics, or equivalent professional experience.
• Background in retail, distribution, or multi-channel e-commerce environments.
• APICS/ASCM (CPIM, CSCP) or ISM (CPSM) certification or progress toward.
• Familiarity with demand-planning software.

DESIRED CHARACTERISTICS

• Detail-oriented and process-minded; obsessive about turning one-off analyses into repeatable processes and reports.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to present clearly to Buyers, leadership, and suppliers.
• Curious and collaborative; comfortable pushing back on assumptions with data and tact.
• Thrives in a fast-changing environment where the process is being built rather than inherited.
• Working understanding of GMROI, in-stock rate, turn, fill rate, demand-system parameters, and other core inventory metrics.
• Bias toward shipping an imperfect first version and iterating, vs. waiting for a perfect dataset.

TOOLS & SYSTEMS

• Microsoft Excel — advanced (pivots, lookups, dynamic arrays, structured workbooks).
• ERP or replenishment system 
• BI / dashboarding 
• SQL or equivalent query language (preferred).
• Microsoft Office suite (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams).