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Business Analyst
Barnes & Noble
New York, NY, United States
Job Details - this job has expired, please see similar jobs below
Barnes & Noble is an innovator in publishing, retail, and digital media, including our award-winning NOOK® products and an expansive collection of digital reading and entertainment content. We welcome creative, dedicated, and service-oriented team members who are passionate about being an integral part of our dynamic community and helping it thrive.
Whether your expertise is in retail, merchandising, publishing, marketing, technology, or finance, we have a place for you at Barnes & Noble.
Overview:
The Business Analyst is responsible for steering application development and business operations on behalf of the merchant team. Motivated by an innate curiosity, a desire for knowledge, and a hunger to make things better, the BA should be fluent with the merchant workflow at both the overview and detail levels: the BA should document and improve upon the functioning of current workflows and applications to create standard operating procedures and best practices that tangibly drive efficiencies and results. Faced with a large and diverse user population, the BA must deliver outstanding customer service, in the form of training and support, while guiding/influencing behavior towards a common, standardized workflow. Additionally, the BA is responsible for operational events, such as the successful running of clearance and the processing of merchant returns-to-vendor. (This job involves working on Black Friday weekend and/or the day after Christmas.)
Responsibilities:
• Assist with conceptualizing and documenting detailed requirements for future developments for the merchant applications, mainly the buyer workbench (IM2), the open-to-buy application (OTB), and the merchandise reports system (MRS). Identify the merchant organization's business needs, create standardize relevant workflows, and design solutions, including user interfaces, systems, and outputs. Ensure that the above applications and their development align with the growth strategy of the organization.
• Assist in the testing of new solutions, helping IT to identify any integration problems or gaps in functional coverage; define, specify, document, and validate (in partnership with IT) new or changed user processes or workflows as a result of application enhancement. Contribute as needed to the IT team’s migration plan for systems or components which are at the end of the software life cycle or which have inherent technological risks.
• Facilitate building a business model to determine developmental priorities and benefits. Identify and prioritize optimizations across the entire inventory management and reporting data chain, from ideation to delivery and sale of product in stores. Critically evaluate information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile conflicts, decompose high-level information into details, abstract up from low-level information to a general understanding, and distinguish user requests from the underlying true needs. Separate solution ideas from business requirements. Deliver the finished business requirements to IT.
• Ensure that requirement statements are complete, consistent, concise, comprehensible, traceable, feasible, unambiguous, verifiable, and consistent with standards. Write requirements specifications in the appropriate level of detail to satisfy those who will use them to complete their work. Present requirements in alternative views such as wireframes, future state process maps, and other visual diagrams as needed.
• Work directly with vertical and cross-functional team members and subject matter experts on activities that include: business analysis planning, requirements elicitation and analysis, business case creation, use case design, hands on system configuration, and business/system process maps. Troubleshoot and resolve system- and reporting-related issues in close coordination with IT and other administrators. Provide the merchants, planners, and allocators with expert guidance on the usage and capabilities of the company’s current tools as well as recommend best practice usage and new standardized tools.
• Help to design the optimal process for store and distribution center replenishment and returns within the core merchandise systems.
• Act as a project manager for large-scale efforts, such as the Black Friday Signed Editions initiative.
• Support users in close-to-real time with their issues, questions, and concerns, fielding questions and determining the nature of the problem (training vs. technical). Resolve user issues or act as a liaison between the IT group and the user community until the issue has been fully resolved.
• Complete and archive all work in alignment with the principles of Digital Asset Management established within the Merchandise Planning & Store Allocation team.
Qualifications:
• Bachelor's degree.
• 3+ years of experience in defining, evolving, and optimizing multiple back-end systems to manage product life-cycle, supply chain activity, purchasing, or retail POS.
• Strong project management skills and ability to conceptualize and design data flow across multiple systems.
• Willingness and desire to learn and understand business data needs. Intellectual curiosity and honesty.
• Highly organized, detail-oriented, efficient, and diligent.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a cross-functional team to ensure departmental and business needs are addressed.
• Excellent communication (written and oral), collaboration, organization and interpersonal skills.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to understand and articulate business needs (potentially from various sources) and verbally communicate to those with and without an IT backgrounds.
• Ability to multi-task and prioritize in a fast-paced and continuously changing environment.
• Ability to foster a positive and motivating work environment, encouraging feedback and innovation.
• Advanced Excel, Access, and PowerPoint skills.
We are an Equal Opportunity Employer of females, minorities, individuals with disabilities and protected veterans.