Transportation Analyst

Job description

DESCRIPTION

Do you like solving complex problems? Do you like speed and fast moving environments? Do you want to work in big data and machine learning? Do you look for a role where you can make a major impact on customer experience? Are you interested to apply leading edge technical skills to deliver multi-million euros transportation savings? Do you want to join a young, dynamic, and successful team supporting strategic relationships with our transportation carriers in Europe? Do you want to play a role in the rapid development of Amazon transportation in Europe? This job is for you:
L5 Procurement Network Optimization Analyst – EU Transportation Procurement
Amazon, an international ecommerce leader is looking for a network optimization analyst to support our European transportation purchasing team headquartered in Luxembourg.
You will be part of the European Network Planning team. This team forecasts, plans, and optimizes the flow of billions of shipments each year. The Amazon network sees trucks depart every minute across Europe on our busiest day, making the team responsible for one of the world’s largest logistics planning operations. You will analyze enormous volumes of data to help Amazon think through how best to organize a quickly growing and changing network. With this team, you will in particular learn all the fascinating details of our in-house transportation management system called ATROPS, and continue to develop in-house tools to better model and optimize our complex European network. For any given shipment delivered to a customer, ATROPS will allocate this shipment to the carrier who can deliver within the promise made to the customer at lowest cost. You will influence how we will structure our contracts to take full advantage of ATROPS’s capability to arbitrage between different services from different carriers based on speed, capacity and costs. You will make sure that contracts and rate cards negotiated by procurement managers can be easily and promptly configured into ATROPS. The EU Network Planning will be your source of information for technical competencies on forecasting, optimization, statistical analysis, and Amazon transportation systems know-how.

In this role, you will be part of a negotiating team and interface with 3 main teams:
- EU Transportation Procurement – You will work 100% on projects managed by procurement managers. This team designs and contracts relationships with our main transportation carriers in Europe. These contracts determine the quality of Amazon delivery services. They also translate into a multi-billion spend which require in depth analysis and simulations to ensure we take the right decisions on behalf of our customers. This budget is by far the biggest chunk of our logistics costs. You will be a key member of the negotiating team. You will be involved in the preparation of the negotiation to document Amazon ideal outcome and worst acceptable scenario. You will then build the simulation model to support negotiation with the carrier according to the negotiation planning cycle agreed with the carrier. Finally, you will take an active support during the negotiation to adjust simulation outputs and make counter proposals to the carrier.

- EU Carrier Management – Our customers in the countries receive their orders via transportation companies which have been contracted by EU Procurement. On a daily basis, they are managed by a carrier manager whose role is to optimize for capacity, speed, and quality within the framework of the contract with his transportation carrier. When contracts are about to terminate, the procurement manager will work with the carrier manager reap and ask for additional benefits to our customers. You will be in charge of simulating the parameters of the contract under discussion to project how our volumes from our fulfillment centers will flow through the country carrier network and change the volume allocation amongst our main carriers. It will be as important to be able to explain the limitations or the validity of your simulations to properly assess risk of a long-term commitment with a given transportation carrier.

- EU Transportation Finance – Once the operational plan has been agreed with the carrier manager, you will need to share your inputs and analyze multiple scenarios with Finance to quantify the financial impact of what is being negotiated. During this process, you will also influence how rate cards can be simplified, standardized, and optimized. You will prepare scenario planning to anticipate how long term contracts will be impacted by how the transportation network will evolve. Your simulation outputs will support contract approvals with our senior leadership in EU and in the US.

Responsibilities
· Build simulation tools that help us understand in a sophisticated way how one of the most complex networks in the world will function under different purchasing scenarios.
· Optimize simulation tools to increase their precision and the speed at which they can be run.
· Collaborate with finance and operations teams to help them make the right trade-offs between speed, quality and cost of delivery and agree on optimized transportation carrier volume projections.
· Work with our Top 30 carriers in Europe to jointly optimize their networks to the benefit of our customers and Amazon costs.
· Model carrier strategies per country which will be turned into commercial transportation contracts.
· Provide reports and analyses through tools, portals and databases (Redshift, SQL, Excel, Tableau, and/or other data management systems) to allow full visibility of both the plan and our execution against it.
· Be part of a negotiating team with Network Planning, Carrier Operations and Transportation Finance supporting the Procurement manager in its negotiation.

Qualifications

Success in this role requires not only strong analytical skills but also excellent interpersonal and communication skills. In this role, you will need to connect with a vast array of teams to align a single vision and timeline, which therefore requires very strong stakeholder management capabilities and a strong business acumen. All your outputs will need to be validated by the highest Finance leadership in Europe given the size of our transportation contracts. Once validated, they will serve as a plan of record to be executed by the operations.

As a Procurement Network Optimization Analyst, you will help identify opportunities to improve systems and processes, and materialize those solutions through sophisticated models and tools. Success in this role requires a detailed knowledge of optimization methods, and excellent technical skillset. We are constantly engaging with new kinds of problems, and use a wide range of tools to reach the right solutions, including Tableau, SQL/Redshift, Python, Excel and simple common sense and business judgement.

Location

Job located in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a city widely known for its beautiful setting and its openness to foreign nationals which represent over half of the population.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

· Masters degree in applied mathematics, computer science or operations research
· Advanced knowledge of SQL/Redshift, Tableau, Python, R, C++ and/or other programming languages
· Project Management experience in a related industry

Desired profile

Qualifications

Success in this role requires not only strong analytical skills but also excellent interpersonal and communication skills. In this role, you will need to connect with a vast array of teams to align a single vision and timeline, which therefore requires very strong stakeholder management capabilities and a strong business acumen. All your outputs will need to be validated by the highest Finance leadership in Europe given the size of our transportation contracts. Once validated, they will serve as a plan of record to be executed by the operations.

As a Procurement Network Optimization Analyst, you will help identify opportunities to improve systems and processes, and materialize those solutions through sophisticated models and tools. Success in this role requires a detailed knowledge of optimization methods, and excellent technical skillset. We are constantly engaging with new kinds of problems, and use a wide range of tools to reach the right solutions, including Tableau, SQL/Redshift, Python, Excel and simple common sense and business judgement.

Location

Job located in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is a city widely known for its beautiful setting and its openness to foreign nationals which represent over half of the population.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

· Bachelors degree with quantitative focus
· 2-3 years of relevant work experience in business analytics with demonstrated proficiency in quantitative analysis using SQL, databases, and MS Excel in a business environment. These strong data analysis skills should include an ability to invent new approaches and to explain their work clearly
· Desire to create and build new tools, analyses and processes and capability to keep bringing innovation in an organization
· Ability to handle multiple competing priorities in a fast-paced environment
· Independent problem solver mindset that can make high quality judgments quickly
· Excellent written, verbal and listening skills