Nick Smith

Managing the Christmas gifting plan end to end for Boots stores from a supply chain perspective. Creating long term forecasts and seasonal buys for our world famous 3 for 2 gifting range and Star Gifts, leading a team of 3 and working alongside stores teams and our extensive supplier base to ensure orders are delivered in an optimised way and stock is dispatched to stores in a manageable way. Working with our commercial teams to maximise the sales potential for the Christmas period, while ensuring that cashflow and profit is maximised by ensuring we exit Christmas with minimal stock holding. Also working cross functionally with our logistics teams to have maximum efficiency in our stock trunking plan, use of warehouse space, and OMS system for hybrid stores. In addition to this I also manage 2 other colleagues, who look after our all year round Home Fragrance business from a supply chain perspective and our brand partner business, which supplies retail outlets at some of our key ROBE partners.

Managing the Christmas gifting plan, the summer suncare plan and the No7 brand for Boots.com. I also manage a team of 2 Supply Assistants who run our daily MI reporting and relationships with the suppliers that provide our online exclusive range of products. Another key part of this role is to identify and implement efficiencies within our supply chain operation, by working collaboratively with both internal and external stakeholders to optimize and even automate some of our processes

Supply Chain Lead for Electrical Beauty and Skincare for Boots UK's digital platform, managing a wide-ranging inventory from Hairdryers to Skin Creams (and a lot in between!). My key responsibilities were to manage forecasts and stock holding while also maximising availability for our customers through building strong internal and external stakeholder relationships, a high attention to detail on both short range and long range forecasting, and an agile mindset to adapt the plan in the fast moving world of digital retail. Since the Covid 19 pandemic hit we saw a phenomenal step up in demand on our online platform, which has presented many challenges both in keeping up with demand and adapting our customer offer overnight to ensure that our warehouse can continue to efficiently dispatch goods to our customers. Working with suppliers, our internal trading teams and our warehouse teams enabled us to adapt quickly to this new world ahead of other retailers and has resulted in triple digit growth.

Managing the end to end supply chain of FMCG in the Healthcare sector. Areas of management included rapid growth areas such as Incontinence, Footcare, and Seasonal inventories including travel medicines and accessories. Involvement in projects for own-label products ranging from new product launches to redesigns and supplier stakeholder management. Maintaining and building relationships with over 40 suppliers, ranging from small local businesses to some of the largest global healthcare suppliers and far east manufacturers. Forecasting: - Create order forecasts for suppliers and our Warehouse Inbound team - Calculate warehouse and store stock holding for our Finance department - Generate store demand forecasts for our Warehouse Outbound team