Data Scientist

DIGITAL

Are you inspired to be part of the team that digitally reimagines the way we work at Mars?

Do you want to practice your digital muscle and ability to engage others on the journey?

Do you want to be part of the Planning Centre of Excellence, the driving force of a human centric digital planning transformation. And do you want to contribute to inspire moments of everyday happiness?

CONTEXT &THE TEAM

In this rapidly changing world, an agile supply chain (SC) makes the difference for our customer and consumers. Mars is transforming their supply chain to become more end to end connected, transparent, faster, agile, customer focused and digital. Mars believes that a human centric and digitally connected planning team is key to unlock this as it is the glue for one end to end SC team.

The End to End Planning Center of Excellence (CoE) sits at the heart of this transformation. It can be seen as a digital catalyst to speed up and strengthen the planning transformation. We will share the common passion to bring the benefits of a digital way of working to the people in the (planning) operation all around Europe for their own benefit and that of customers / consumers. The team focusses on production sites in Europe and sales in 90 countries all over the world. It will operate by the principals of; full transparency of processes and data, planning by exception and continuous improvement of people processes and systems.

Within the CoE the Insights & Analytics team (IA) is building the data driven decision making muscle to empower our EU MW planning & logistics colleagues. The IA team exists of business analysts who translate business needs and clarify real problem statement, and data scientists who are working on digital prototyping and solutions. On expertise and best practices, the regional team is linked to a Mars global analytics and data scientist network.

THE ROLE

The data scientist have to make sure that data needs to be gathered in a way that can be easily re-used in the future (data infrastructure), the statistical analytics and forecasting tools need to be optimised and the reporting dashboards provide a real time intuitive summary. The DS engages with the business users to understand the real problem, engages with users to secure data quality and to provide a trusted solution required to create a user-friendly and intuitive dashboard. To face these activities the data analyst is working together with multiple teams that will help with the process knowledge and the stakeholder engagement the data analyst collaborates on these topics and gives guidance through his/her data insights and then leads the technical solutioning where needed. In this way the ideal data scientist has a strong technical profile with high business acumen and a passion to help people utilise digital tools.

In practice this means the role has 5 key elements that are based on continuous improvement: 1. Agree and emerge themselves in the priority business problems to be solved. 2. Build the required and reusable data infrastructure for the best analysis 3. Solve data issues through technology or organisational alignment 4. Co-develop a repetitive mechanism to analyse and solve the problem. 5. Repeat the cycle.

Key to this is to ensure that the digital solution is communicated and explained to the planning team in a non-technical way to ensure the result is accepted and not overwritten. This requires the ability to listen to market feedback, evaluate statistical findings / improvements, provide business insights on different level an aggregation and clearly communicate to stakeholders in their language.

As this is a complete new way of planning in Mars this approach will to evolve over time. The data scientist will need to amend his leadership and stakeholder management style to this. Especially in the beginning it will be crucial to be able to bridge the gap between statistics and standard business way of working.

Key Responsibilities

• Define focused value added planning problem-statements for balancing service, stock and cost for the business based on use-cases, design thinking and value stream analysis.
• Providing insights from data to support the organization making more and more data driven decisions in the area of: forecasting, supply planning, risk analyst in supply & demand, inventory setting
• Presenting results in a compelling and clear manner to drive business decision making
• Supports demand sensing activities in E2Open through the provision of analysis and insights to optimize forecasting results
• Build algorithms and design experiments to merge, manage, interrogate, and extract good quality data needed for this.
• Look for opportunities to improve the flow of data and evaluate new and emerging technologies
• Identifying new relevant data sources and incorporating these in the data structure.
• Enhancing data collection procedures to create new data sources

Experience / Background

Education and Professional

• B.S. or BA in computer science, data science, machine learning, mathematics, statistics or related natural science or technical degree. Master or advanced degree preferred
• 3-5 years of experience working in a technical / analytics role

Knowledge / Experience

• Experience in a programming language such as Phyton
• Experience with data structures (SQL, Azure)
• Experience with ERP and Advanced Planning Systems (preferably E2Open or Rapid Response)
• Working knowledge of data mining, machine learning and other statistical techniques
• Understanding of Lean / Six Sigma / root cause analysis, e.g., 5 why’s
• Ability to support complex analysis in understandable forms to business stakeholders
• Attention to detail and a passion for data accuracy
• Fluent in English
• Experience in the aera of Supply Chain Management
• Strong expertise in combination of Mathematics, Statistics, Business acumen and programming

Mars is an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you need assistance or an accommodation during the application process because of a disability, it is available upon request. The company is pleased to provide such assistance, and no applicant will be penalized as a result of such a request.

About Mars:

Mars is a family-owned business with more than $35 billion in global sales. We produce some of the world’s best-loved brands: M&M’s®, SNICKERS®, TWIX®, MILKY WAY®, DOVE®, PEDIGREE®, ROYAL CANIN®, WHISKAS®, EXTRA®, ORBIT®, 5™, SKITTLES®, BEN’S ORIGINAL® and COCOAVIA®. Alongside our consumer brands, we proudly take care of half of the world’s pets through our nutrition, health and services businesses such as Banfield Pet Hospitals™, BluePearl®, Linnaeus, AniCura, VCA™ and Pet Partners™. Headquartered in McLean, VA, Mars operates in more than 80 countries. The Mars Five Principles – Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom – insp