Commercial Excellence Senior Manager

About the Role

Panda Retail Company – Savola Group is seeking a Commercial Excellence Senior Manager to join their team in Jeddah. This full-time role is central to enhancing the commercial function's strategic planning and decision-making capabilities, moving from traditional reporting to advanced, AI-augmented commercial decision systems.

Role Purpose

The Commercial Excellence Senior Manager will lead the commercial function's end-to-end navigation, planning, and decision-intelligence. This position provides the CCO and Commercial leadership with an independent, fact-based perspective on business direction, strategy execution, gap drivers, and necessary decisions or negotiations to achieve plans.

Key Responsibilities

• Manage the annual budget, monthly plan, end-year estimate, and forecast-to-landing navigation logic for the Commercial department.
• Translate strategic objectives and market dynamics into detailed planning assumptions and validate them with evidence.
• Lead the conversion of approved commercial ambitions into supplier-level growth, margin, and negotiation strategies.
• Reconcile supplier plans with overall sales and margin targets, quantifying required contract, term, and funding improvements to address economic gaps.
• Oversee the monthly Sales Navigation cycle and quarterly/six-month gate reviews, directing leadership focus to exceptions, decisions, and corrective actions.
• Establish the closed-loop plan-versus-actual mechanism, ensuring all gaps have identified root causes, actions, owners, timelines, and quantified landing impacts.
• Define Commercial KPIs, specify Power BI business requirements, govern semantic consistency, and drive dashboard adoption, shifting dashboards from descriptive to actionable.
• Develop 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.
• Continuously 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 relevant experience is required for this role.

Work Type

This is a full-time position based in Jeddah.