Commercial Excellence Senior Manager

About the Role

Panda Retail Company – Savola Group is seeking a Commercial Excellence Senior Manager to join their team in Makkah, with operations spanning Jeddah and Makkah. This full-time role is central to leading the Commercial function's end-to-end navigation, planning, and decision-intelligence capabilities. The position provides the CCO and Commercial leadership with an independent, fact-based view of business direction, strategy materialization, gap drivers, and necessary decisions or negotiations to achieve plans.

Role Purpose and Evolution

The Commercial Excellence Senior Manager will own the evolution from reporting-centric analytics to a governed commercial decision system. This system will be augmented by AI, automation, and advanced analytics, ensuring that commercial decisions are data-driven and efficient. The role requires a strategic approach to planning and forecasting within the commercial landscape.

Key Accountabilities

• Manage the annual budget, monthly plan, end-year estimate, and forecast-to-landing navigation logic for the Commercial function.
• Translate strategy and market dynamics into granular planning assumptions and validate them with evidence.
• Lead the conversion of approved commercial ambition into supplier-level growth, margin, and negotiation strategies.
• Reconcile supplier plans with total sales and margin ambition, quantifying contract, term, and funding improvements needed to close economic gaps.
• Oversee the monthly Sales Navigation cycle and quarterly/six-month gate reviews, focusing leadership attention on exceptions, decisions, and corrective actions.
• Establish the closed-loop plan-versus-actual mechanism, ensuring gaps have root causes, actions, owners, timings, and quantified landing impacts.
• Define Commercial KPIs, Power BI business requirements, semantic governance, and dashboard adoption, shifting dashboards from descriptive to actionable.
• Create and govern Commercial Decision Intelligence use cases utilizing LLMs, agents, automation, external research, and advanced analytics.
• Ensure AI-generated analysis is grounded, auditable, evaluated, and subject to human decision ownership, maintaining override and learning governance.
• Act as the Commercial product owner with IT/Data for data access, quality, integration, security, and productionization.
• Develop the team from report producers into commercial navigators, analytics translators, and AI-enabled decision partners.
• Identify high-value opportunities where data, automation, or AI can improve commercial decisions, productivity, or negotiation outcomes.

Qualifications and Experience

• A minimum of 10 years of experience in commercial planning, category/commercial management, revenue growth management, retail analytics, FP&A/business planning, strategy, or a closely related field.
• Strong preference for grocery retail, FMCG, or consumer retail exposure. Candidates demonstrating strong transferable supplier economics and planning capability will also be considered.
• Proven track record operating across multiple business units/categories and influencing senior commercial stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ownership of complex planning/forecasting/performance cycles and the ability to translate data into executive decisions.
• Hands-on exposure to BI/analytics environments, with strong familiarity with Power BI preferred.
• Evidence of adopting emerging digital/AI tools to solve business problems is preferred; deep software engineering skills are not required.

Critical Competencies

• Commercial and supplier economics expertise.
• Strategic planning, forecasting, and scenario logic.
• Structured problem-solving and systems thinking.
• Executive synthesis and challenge capabilities.
• Data and analytics fluency.
• Understanding of Power BI and semantic models.
• LLM, agent, and automation product fluency.
• Statistical and machine learning literacy.
• Change leadership and adoption skills.
• People leadership and capability building.

Work Environment

This is a full-time position based in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, supporting operations in both Jeddah and Makkah. The role involves working within a dynamic retail environment, contributing to the strategic direction of the Commercial function.