Advisor, Category Planning - Analytics

What Category Planning contributes to Cardinal Health

Marketing is responsible for assessing customer needs, market conditions and competition to inform business strategy. Marketing implements the strategy through developing, commercializing and monitoring the appropriate products and services.

Category Planning is responsible for the aggregation, reporting and forecasting of designated businesses and their P&L. Supports Category Management team on building category financial plans that support and drive the desired financial results that increase market share and exceed customer expectations.

The Category Planning team is a strategic business partner embedded deeply within Pharmaceutical Division Consumer Health Category Management, dedicated to turning market and performance data into a competitive advantage. By leveraging advanced analytics platforms and business intelligence tools, we uncover the story behind the numbers to solve complex commercial challenges. Our insights directly shape category strategies, influence product assortments, and drive measurable business growth.

We serve as the vital link between data and execution, empowering Category Management leaders to anticipate market trends, track performance seamlessly, and make confident, profitable decisions.

Job Summary

As an analytics specialist reporting to the Director of Category Planning, this role will play a pivotal role in shaping how data is utilized to solve complex business challenges and guide category strategy. Partnering directly with cross-functional stakeholders, you will uncover data needs and translate key business questions into scalable, foundational reports and interactive dashboards. In this highly impactful role, you will transition routine data requests into repeatable analytics solutions while championing data hygiene and exploring innovative AI and automation use cases.

This is a unique opportunity to grow your technical and business acumen while directly empowering leadership with reliable, actionable insights.

Responsibilities

* Develop Foundational Reporting:
Support the creation and maintenance of core reports and dashboards, balancing speed, accuracy, and usability.

* Understand the Business Need:
Partner with internal teams and external stakeholders to gather data requirements, clarify the underlying business questions, and apply that context to tool creation.

* Scale Solutions:
Fulfill ad-hoc reporting requests while actively working to translate routine asks into scalable, repeatable reporting solutions.

* Drive Tool Adoption:
Point stakeholders to "single source of truth" dashboards to provide visibility and avoid unnecessarily re-creating analyses.

* Support Business Data Intake:
Assist in integrating non-transactional data (e.g., category mappings, financial budgets, market data) into our reporting workflows, supporting standard intake processes and documentation standards.

* Ensure Data Integrity:
Apply strong data hygiene and quality assurance discipline. Validate inputs and outputs using reasonableness checks, variance flags, and source reconciliation before releasing tools or insights.

* Build Core Acumen:
Develop a deep familiarity with standard metrics, definitions, and assumptions to continuously build technical and business acumen, progressing toward full tool ownership.

* Leverage AI & Automation:
Explore and promote early use cases for AI and automation to enhance reporting workflows and support faster business decision-making.

* Support Business Execution:
Assist with meeting preparation by pulling relevant metrics, summarizing key insights, and highlighting open questions or risks for business leaders.

* Prioritize Effectively:
Manage workloads using agreed-upon criteria (business impact, urgency, effort, dependencies) and communicate tradeoffs early.

* Communicate Proactively:
Provide clear, continuous updates to stakeholders, confirming receipt of requests, communicating progress or blockers, and closing the loop with exceptional accuracy and attention to detail.

* Collaborate Cross-Functionally:
Build strong interpersonal skills with business partners, practice professional clarification and constructive pushback to ensure alignment on scope and deliverables.

Qualifications

* Bachelor's degree in Business Analytics, Data Analytics, Economics, Finance, Statistics, Data Science, or equivalent work experience preferred

* 4+ years of experience in category management/category planning analytics, commercial/sales operations analytics, or a similar data-driven role, preferred

* Advanced experience designing and building interactive dashboards using modern BI tools (Looker, Power

BI, Tableau or similar).

Experience with workflow automation tools (Alteryx or similar) is highly preferred

* Strong proficiency in writing and optimizing SQL queries, with hands-on experience using cloud data warehouses (e.g., Google Big Query), preferred

* Experience or strong interest in leveraging AI tools (Gemini, Copilot or similar) and…