Commercial Planning Executive

Apply now Job no: 566363
Work type: Full time
Site: Redditch
Categories: Retail Operations Support
Location: Worcestershire
Salary: £40,000

At Halfords, our mission is to inspire and support a lifetime of motoring and cycling. As a specialist retailer, we lead the market through customer‑driven innovation and a distinct product range. We are dedicated to providing our customers with an integrated, unique, and convenient service experience, from e‑bike and electric vehicle servicing to on‑demand solutions. Our commitment is to foster customer loyalty by offering compelling reasons to keep coming back to our stores, ensuring a lifetime of motoring and cycling enjoyment.

The teams at our Support Centre work with every other area of our business, putting them at the heart of the action and playing a key role in our success and growth. Everyone brings their individual knowledge and experience to work every day, working as one team to keep things moving smoothly.

If you’re willing to get stuck in, you’ll love it here too. So put yourself at the heart of a dynamic, fast‑paced working environment where expertise and focus take people far.

As a Commercial Planning Executive within our Commercial Operations team, you’ll sit at the heart of how Halfords plans and governs commercial activity across range reviews, trading strategies, promotional planning, and category development. Working closely with the Commercial Planning Manager, you’ll maintain and improve the planning frameworks, trackers, and reporting views that keep commercial delivery aligned, visible, and on track across multiple categories and functions.

Day‑to‑day, you’ll be consolidating information from across the business, maintaining the stage‑gate process through range reviews, producing reports, and building integrated planning views that give decision‑makers a clear and reliable picture of where things stand. A meaningful part of the role is also looking at how things are done and finding ways to improve them, whether through better tooling, smarter use of Microsoft 365, dashboards, or exploring how AI and automation can reduce manual effort and sharpen planning accuracy.

This role will involve a level of admin at times and requires someone who is comfortable working without a rigid task list. You’ll need to be curious, autonomous, and willing to push for better ways of doing things. The upside is real breadth and exposure, where you’ll get a genuine view of how a major national retailer operates commercially, working across multiple functions and with plenty of scope to shape the role as it grows.

• Support the Commercial Planning Manager in governing and reporting on range review delivery, ensuring alignment with trading strategies, milestones, promotional plans, and commercial priorities.
• Maintain and continuously improve planning tools, trackers, and reporting views using Microsoft 365 applications, ensuring data is accurate, accessible, and clearly communicated to stakeholders.
• Build integrated planning views that consolidate commercial activity across categories and functions, supporting decision‑making across the 3 to 5 year category and range development cycle.
• Manage the stage‑gate process across range reviews, coordinating activity through each gate and keeping stakeholders informed and on track.
• Support the identification and monitoring of workload forecasts, resource demands, planning risks, and delivery constraints, enabling timely escalation where needed.
• Enhance existing Power BI reporting and dashboard solutions to support commercial governance and give Category Heads better visibility of team effectiveness and cross‑functional delivery.
• Identify opportunities to simplify processes and champion the use of technology, automation, and AI to drive productivity and improve planning alignment across the business.

• Proven experience in retail operations or commercial planning, with a solid understanding of how trading and commercial functions work in practice.
• Advanced Excel skills including pivot tables and VLOOKUPs, alongside strong working knowledge of Microsoft 365 tools including Lists,…