Global Forecasting Director, Respiratory Inhaled
AstraZeneca

Job Info

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GIACE Overview

At AstraZeneca, we're not afraid to do things differently. We're resetting expectations of what a bio-pharmaceutical company can be. This means we're opening new ways to work, ground-breaking and cutting-edge methods and bringing unexpected teams together. AstraZeneca is organized around two core business units, BioPharmaceuticals (BBU) and Oncology. The BBU focuses on development and commercialization of AstraZeneca's Respiratory, Cardiovascular, Metabolic, Renal, and Infectious Disease therapeutic areas.

Global Insights, Analytics & Commercial Excellence (GIACE) is a strategic function, critical for enabling success in the growth of the BBU business. Our ambition is to build an industry-leading organization, empowering our Commercial teams through the generation of compelling evidence and insights, while ensuring they have the tools and skills to deliver impactful launches that change the practice of medicine for the benefit of patients. Within GIACE, the Insights & Analytics function is organized across two teams and supports both the US and Global organizations: Respiratory Insights, Analytics & Forecasting and CVRM Insights, Analytics and Forecasting (Cardiovascular, Metabolic, Renal).

Team Overview

The aim of the Insights, Analytics, and Forecasting teams is to establish industry-leading capabilities across the core areas of analytics, forecasting, reporting, business planning, and insight capabilities. It will leverage, reapply, and advance standard methodologies in capabilities and operations from Global and US more broadly across geographies the insights, analytics, and forecasting teams also strives to scale and deploy these capabilities in a highly efficient manner so that continuous innovation can be pursued.

The Insight, analytics and forecasting teams' partner to drive portfolio and brand strategy and performance. Together we strive to uncover deep customer insights in order to drive improved decision-making and business impact. We are looking for leaders who have the passion to drive business results and bring innovation to what we do for greater impact.

Job Description

The Forecasting Leader (Director) is a critical business partner with the brand team, producing brand volume forecasts and collaborating with the team on how to handle risks and opportunities for the business. As a Forecast Director/Leader, you will have responsibility for brands and play an integral role in understanding performance, setting expectations for performance, and guiding brand strategy. You will be responsible for implementing and ensuring consistent application of standard processes across the organization drawing from inside and outside the industry, leading to objective forecasts supported by insight & analytics. You will partner with the Forecast Lead, Senior Director to help develop and implement new capabilities and improvements and assist in training across the Forecasting team.

The Forecasting Leader will develop product-specific short-term and long-term forecasts models and maintain up-to-date forecast models, reflecting current data, information, assumptions; own the forecasting and business planning processes and all associated work streams (sales bridges, ad hocs supporting Finance, etc.); Identify key business issues that impact short-term and long-range product and market forecasts; clearly and pro-actively surface these issues, incorporate the results of primary research into the forecast model(s) to reflect anticipated risks and opportunities on sales outlook, and define forecasting processes and build capabilities in forecasting for new and inline assets. In addition, you will have responsibility to develop forecasts for your focused therapeutic area using patient based forecast models and ensure alignment on forecast assumptions and other critical analytical assessments with business partners including Marketing, Sales, Market Access and Pricing, Market Research, Global Marketing and Insight, Finance, and Sales Operations.

This role is reserved for someone with marketing and research experience who has deep forecasting and quantitative technical skills combined with outstanding interpersonal skills. As such, those who will qualify for this position are both technically sound and have the ability to be a proactive internal consultant, making valuable contributions to AstraZeneca's commercial organization beyond their analytical prowess through their understanding of secondary data, market research, industry knowledge, and track record of innovative and impactful decision support.

Key Responsibilities:

• Perform strategic long-term brand and franchise forecasting for key markets, and provide strategic perspective / mentorship on portfolio and brand strategy. Coordinate / interact with key markets on sales forecasts during strategic planning process
• Proactive identify brand risks and opportunities, and strategies for how to address them to deliver business success. Perform sensitivity analysis to assist in opportunity and risk management.
• Develop brand-new product introduction volume forecasts, both short-term and long-term, to foster into strategic and operational planning processes.
• Partner with GMAP and Finance to understand market access and price impact, assist estimation of SMM, and support development of P&L for the opportunity evaluation
• Summarize and present findings through various communication channels
• Develop a deep understanding of internal customers' data and analytical needs focusing on the customer-facing model leadership
• Foster the use of local customer insight in strategic and resourcing decisions across the business.
• Apply deeper technical skills and knowledge that is shared across the functional area (e.g., deep knowledge of key data sets, modeling capabilities, etc.)
• Demonstrate a high level of understanding of the points of integration of our work and that of our colleagues.
• Proactively leverage appropriate information into forecast via a variety of tools and sources
• Supervise the external environment to stay up to date on leading analytic capabilities, both within and outside of pharma, which can be applied within the organization

Essential requirements

• 8+ years of analytical experience, 5 years in Health Care Industry including experience in product forecasting; or equivalent combination of education and experience. In-depth knowledge of forecasting techniques and use of different forecast models and approaches.
• Experience in building, deploying, and embedding capabilities into an organization.
• Strong understanding of primary market research, advanced analytics, and competitive intelligence. Primary market research experience preferred.
• Experience in Commercial Evaluation / Global Strategic Planning involving alliance preferred
• Multiple-year Pharma experience, preferably in Global or ex-US, making recommendations on major drivers of product success, and advising on drug development candidate process and Health Care environment.
• Experience utilising a range of analytics involving standard data in the Pharmaceutical Industry e.g. IQVIA (MIDAS, DDD NPA, Monthly Xponent), claims data (Truven, Marketscan), epidemiological data etc
• Reportable accomplishments around converting derived insight into strategic mentorship and developing this skill among direct reports
• Outstanding eye for business, strategic thinking and understanding of sales and marketing business practices
• Ambitious mentality to impact leadership and high emotional intelligence
• Experience advising senior level executives, and problem-solving skills
• Strong ability to influence laterally and vertically
• High degree of creativity and innovation in developing new approaches, processes and methodologies
• Strong analytical expertise, excellent financial modelling and forecasting skills
• Strong written and verbal communication

Educational requirements

• Bachelor's Degree in relevant field
• Advanced degree preferred (e.g., PhD / MBA / Masters in areas such as Statistics/Decision Sciences)

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.

AstraZeneca requires all US employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 but will consider requests for reasonable accommodations as required by applicable law.

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