Forecasting Leader

Job Description

Title: Forecasting LeaderLocation: Cambridge, UK Opening date for applications: 25th September 2020Closing date for applications: 26th October 2020At AstraZeneca, were not afraid to do things differently. Were resetting expectations of what a bio-pharmaceutical company can be. This means were opening new ways to work, ground-breaking and cutting-edge methods and bringing unexpected teams togetherAstraZeneca is organised around two core business units, BioPharmaceuticals (BBU) and Oncology. The BBU focuses on development and commercialisation of AstraZeneca’s Respiratory, Cardiovascular, Metabolic, Renal and Infectious Disease therapeutic areas.Global Insights, Analytics & Commercial Excellence (GIACE) is a strategic function, critical for enabling success in the growth of the BBU business. Our ambition is to build an industry-leading organisation, empowering our Commercial teams through the generation of compelling evidence and insights, while ensuring they have the tools and skills to deliver impactful launches that change the practice of medicine for the benefit of patients. Within GIACE, the Insights & Analytics function is organised across three teams and supports both the US and Global organisation. Team Overview The aim of the Insights & Analytics Center of Excellence is to establish industry-leading capabilities across the core areas of analytics, forecasting, reporting, business planning, and insight capabilities. It will leverage, reapply, and advance best practices in capabilities and operations from Global and US more broadly across geographies. In the area of advanced analytics, the ambition is to accelerate the development and application of advanced analytic methodologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to solve business problems. The CoE also aims to scale and deploy these capabilities in a highly efficient manner so that continuous innovation can be pursued.The Insight Teams and the CoE partner to drive portfolio and brand strategy and performance. Together we strive to uncover deep customer insights in order to drive improved decision-making and business impact. We are looking for leaders who have the passion to drive business results and bring innovation to what we do for greater impact. Candidate Focus and Challenge – Job Description The Forecasting Leader is a critical business, producing forecasts and collaborating with the team on how to manage risks and opportunities for the business. As a Forecast Leader, you will have responsibility for a brand/brands and play an integral role in understanding performance, setting expectations for performance, and guiding brand strategy. You will be responsible for implementing and ensuring consistent application of best practices across the organisation drawing from inside and outside the industry, leading to objective forecasts supported by insight & analytics. You will partner with the Forecast Lead, Senior Director to help develop and implement new capabilities and improvements and assist in training across the Forecasting team.You will develop product-specific short-term and long-term forecasts models and maintain up-to-date forecast models, reflecting current data, information, assumptions; lead the forecasting and business planning processes and all associated work streams (sales bridges, ad hocs supporting Finance, etc.); Identify key business issues that impact short-term and long-range product and market forecasts; clearly and pro-actively surface these issues, incorporate the results of primary research into the forecast model(s) to reflect anticipated risks and opportunities on sales outlook, and define forecasting processes and build capabilities in forecasting for inline and late stage assets. In addition, you will have responsibility to develop forecasts for your focused therapeutic area using patient flow forecast models, patient based forecast models, and statistical trending and ensure alignment on forecast assumptions and other critical analytical assessments with business partners.This role is reserved for someone who has deep forecasting and quantitative technical skills combined with outstanding communication skills. As such, those who will qualify for this position are both technically sound and have the ability to be a proactive internal consultant, adding value to AstraZenecas commercial organisation beyond their analytical prowess through their understanding of secondary data, industry knowledge, and track record of innovative and impactful decision support. Key Responsibilities:

Proactive identification of portfolio and brand risks and opportunities, and strategies for how to address them to deliver business success.

Ensuring objectivity of brand/therapeutic area forecasts of internal and external opportunities through establishing objectives aligned around forecast accuracy.

Monitors the external environment to stay up to date on latest therapeutic area research and clinical development, as well as competitor landscape

Sensitivity analysis to assist in opportunity identification and risk management.

Partnership with GMAP and Finance to understand market access and price impact, estimate SMM, and support development of P&L for the opportunity evaluation

Develop a deep understanding of internal customers data and analytical needs focusing on the customer-facing model leadership

Champion the use of local customer insight in strategic and resourcing decisions across the business.

Access appropriate information via a variety of tools and sources

Summarise and present findings through various communication channels

Capability in applying deeper technical skills and knowledge that is shared across the functional area (e.g., deep knowledge of key data sets, modelling capabilities, etc.)

Demonstrate a high level of understanding of the points of integration of our work and that of our colleagues.

Ability to work with multiple countries to incorporate local insights.

Candidate Knowledge, Skills and Experience Essential requirements:

Solid analytical experience and experience in Health Care Industry including experience in product forecasting. In-depth knowledge of forecasting techniques and use of different forecast models and approaches.

Experience in building, deploying, and embedding capabilities into an organisation.

Experience in Commercial Evaluation / Business Development preferred

Experience in the global Pharma Industry, making decisions on major drivers of product success, advising on drug development candidate process and Health Care environment.Preferred experience in the global Pharma Industry, ma