Vice President, Inventory Management

PriceSmart; Miami (FL); In loco; USD 180.000 - 300.000; Tempo pieno

Descrizione del lavoro

PriceSmart, Inc. seeks a senior leader to own end‑to‑end inventory management across clubs and markets. You will define inventory strategies, steer a monthly merchandising forecast, and lead replenishment and Open‑to‑Buy processes, ensuring inventory health and alignment with financial targets.

You will collaborate with Finance, Supply Chain, and Buying to optimize turns, margin and member experience while guiding the growth and scaling of PriceSmart's inventory function globally.

Mansioni

• Establish an inventory strategy to optimize cash flow, sales and member experience across clubs and markets.
• Own the monthly merchandise forecasting process with a 15‑month horizon and dual currency lenses.
• Lead replenishment and inventory execution, including safety stock, lead times and Open‑to‑Buy.
• Drive inventory health metrics, reporting cadences, and cross‑functional alignment with Finance, Supply Chain and Buying.

Descrizione del lavoro

Hello, potential PriceSmart candidate. We’re on a mission to hire the very best, and are committed to creating exceptional employee experiences where everyone is respected and has access to equal opportunity. We realize the greatest contributions to the company can come from anywhere in the organization, and we know that the next one could be yours!

The VP, Inventory Management leads this work end to end: building an accurate inventory and receipts forecast, executing replenishment that keeps clubs in stock without overinvesting in inventory, and building the systems, processes, and team needed to do this reliably at PriceSmart's scale. This role inherits momentum already underway — a new monthly forecasting process, an ongoing RELEX system rollout, and the chance to help define how inventory health itself gets measured — this role will shape how that work gets completed, rather than simply executing someone else's design.

The Inventory Management team is distributed today: inventory managers and a handful of demand planners are based in San Diego, while the majority of the team — including most demand planning — sits in Colombia. This leader will need to assess that structure and determine the right long-term shape and location mix for the team as the function scales alongside the rest of Merchandise Operations & Analytics.

What You’ll Do

Inventory Strategy

• Establish a strategy that determines how inventory should flow through PriceSmart’s supply chain, in order to maximize cash flow as well as sales/reliability for members. This includes but is not limited to:
• In-stock goals based on item role/strategy (replenish vs rotational, destination vs discretionary), differentiated further by club/market.
• Guidelines for what should be cross-dock vs held in DCs, developed in partnership with Supply Chain, who owns execution of the physical network
• Inventory investment strategy by department/area — determining where inventory dollars should be concentrated for the strongest return (turns, margin, member experience) and where the business should deliberately run lean.
• New-item and seasonal launch inventory strategy: initial buy depth, how quickly to ramp replenishment once real sell-through data exists, and a clean approach to season-end or discontinuation.
• Aged and obsolete inventory strategy — clear triggers for flagging slow-moving or aging inventory and a defined markdown/liquidation path, so this doesn’t default to ad hoc handling.
• Inventory strategy for the ecommerce extended aisle assortment, including whether items draw from a shared club inventory pool versus dedicated ecommerce inventory, and ensuring inventory accuracy and reliability by channel.
• Partner with Supply Chain on distribution network capacity planning as PriceSmart’s club count grows, so inventory strategy evolves alongside what the physical network can actually support.

Demand Forecasting & Planning

• Own the inventory and receipts forecast within the new monthly merchandise forecasting process — a 15-month rolling horizon by market × department, with dual currency lenses (constant-currency and current-forecast-rate) and Open-to-Buy as a calculated output. Buyers own the sales and margin forecast; this role owns translating that into an inventory/receipts plan and is accountable for the accuracy of that translation.
• Lead the training and change management needed to bring the full F&R organization into this process, including how buying’s sales/margin forecast connects to and drives the inventory/receipts side this team owns.
• Reconcile top-down financial/merchandise plans with bottoms-up, club- and SKU-level inventory and receipt requirements.
• Own forecast accuracy and bias measurement on the inventory/receipts forecast, and drive continuous improvement against it.

Replenishment & Inventory Execution

• Own replenishment strategy and execution across all clubs and markets, including safety stock, lead-time, and reorder-point logic that accounts for the real differences between Corporate-sourced (longer import lead times) and Local-sourced goods.
• Be the business owner accountable for getting the most out of the RELEX rollout — including resolving the item data quality issues that are currently undermining system performance, in close partnership with IT/Merchandising Systems and the Item, Data & Vendor Operations team.
• Separate and redesign the showstock parameter, which today does two structurally different jobs — triggering replenishment and setting a presentation-floor minimum — into two distinct, correctly-tuned parameters.
• Represent Forecast & Replenishment in the cross-functional showstock/inventory alignment review with Club Operations.
• Own the Open-to-Buy process and calculation, in close partnership with Finance and buyers, ensuring inventory investment stays aligned to sales, margin, and inventory targets.
• Surface and resolve tension between merchandise ambition and inventory discipline before it becomes a financial problem.

Inventory Health, KPI’s & Reporting

• Partner with Finance, Supply Chain and Buying to finalize a standard, agreed set of inventory health metrics — resolving open questions like whether turns and inventory are measured at cost or retail, on an average or ending basis, and what "in-stock" should actually mean (today's definition counts a single unit on hand as in-stock, which materially overstates true availability).
• Support the change management & training needed across F&R and Buying teams to understand, adopt and track these metrics.
• Identify which metrics should be used for F&R team performance/accountability expectations
• Build and own the recurring inventory health reporting cadence for Buyers, Buying Leadership and ELT.

Cross-Functional & International Complexity

• First and foremost – foster a deep, collaborative partnership between F&R and Buying teams; these two teams must operate with complete clarity about roles & responsibilities, strong. alignment on priorities and constant communication about current state and future plans.