Job Title: Director of Strategy and Data Analytics

Work Place Flexibility: Onsite 

Legal Entity: Entergy Services, LLC 

Job Summary/Purpose

The Director of Strategy and Data Analytics is responsible for providing leadership and oversight that ensures operational strategy development, deep data analytics, and LEAN operating principles are embedded in the operations and across the organization to drive operational excellence that deliver premier customer service to meet the needs of Entergy’s stakeholders. The Director ensures that the organization is well positioned in a rapidly evolving and competitive environment by developing a data driven approach and deep analytics to understanding the challenges facing our operations to serve our customers at a premier level.  They are highly skilled in facilitation and bringing upstream and downstream process owners together in a structured problem-solving environment utilizing data to improve operational performance that will provide improved service for our customers inside and outside of Meter to Cash. This position ensures that future needs of customers are being met through understanding operational benchmarking standards to drive operational excellence.  This role is responsible to ensure the compliance and understanding with 100+ SOX and Operational controls to achieve federal and regulatory standards. This role will provide oversight of the bottom ups financial budgeting and forecast accuracy and alignment to targets and efficiency expectations.  They will understand the financial modeling that derives uncollectible reserve/expense for the organization based on the $200M+ of past due receivables and drive the operational strategy for how to optimize top quartile financial performance and operational experience for collection customers. The position ensures that the organization utilizes LEAN tools to develop operational strategies that are clearly understood by all stakeholders and cascaded through the organization to drive strategic goals at the optimum pace. This senior leadership position will support the Vice president in the development, driving and prioritization of the operating challenges across the organization.  This position acts as a representative and ambassador to ensure a data driven perspective is driven across our processes through building positive and productive relationships across Utility leaders and other end to end organization executives.

Job Duties/Responsibilities

• Operational Strategy
  • Drives operational challenges to stakeholders by systematically cultivating and maintaining long-term, collaborative relationships with internal organizations to achieve outcomes through a data driven perspective.  
  • Facilitates upstream and downstream problem-solving sessions to determine root cause to fix process problems to deliver improved customer experience.
  • Establishes a training approach for the organization in LEAN operating principles of visual management, operating reviews, problem solving and standardization.  
  • Constantly monitoring the customer service environment to bring innovative initiatives to enhance internal efficiency, minimize cost and effectiveness and the operational performance to improve customer experience.
  • Actively develops opportunities for strategic alignment with senior leadership through research and benchmarking new operational processes and optimized technology to reduce operating costs, improve capabilities, and support growth and change.
  • Responsible for developing and deploying change management and communication across the organization as customer expectations are constantly pushing the organization to improve.  
  • Responsible for the development and management of the operational vision, strategy and tactics that align to data driven outcomes desired by our customers.
• Data Analytics
  • Develops optimal data architecture to streamline how data can provide insights
  • Promotes data-driven decision making and customer focus analytics
  • Provide data-driven insights that inform the business strategy and metric outcomes
  • Builds the appropriate business intelligent tools and data warehouses across the business
  • Communicate and distill complex data sets into clear, compelling and actionable take-aways
  • Utilizing LEAN operating principles to develop single source of truth for all customer channel data and operational data
  • Develop LEAN visual management tools and cascade them through the organization
  • Develop robust data analytics capability to understand customer inputs and metric outcomes
  • Automate and enhance reporting capability across the Contact Center
  • Provide accurate and timely reporting on key metrics at all levels or the organization to enable solid decision making
• Organizational Customer Centricity
  • Gathering and developing appropriate tools to share operational challenges end to end that employees and customers are experiencing across the organization
  • Key voice in understanding operational challenges in a data driven approach and expectations
  • Ensure the organization is identifying best practices inside and outside the industry to drive operational excellence to deliver premier customer experience
  • Aligning organization around mitigating customer frictions in our operational processes
• Performance Oversight
  • Partners with our Financial team to provide visibility and insights into the annual operating and capital budgets as well as financial education to leaders at all levels.
  • Develops and messages performance outcomes for the organizations and stakeholders
  • Ensures open and transparent communication regarding operational challenges with utility leaders and other executives across the company
• SOX and Operational Controls
  • Partners closely with Internal and External audit to establish strong SOX and Operational controls across the end to end Meter to Cash organization
  • Works closely with leadership across meter to cash to develop testing and control plans to address any gaps and deficiencies across the controls.
• Financial Controls
  • Partner with Finance to understand the financial models for uncollectibles expense and bad debt reserve and provide recommendations and insights based on operational strategies and executions.
  • Provide data analytics and develop the strategies to optimize collection action of past due receivables balances while mitigating customer frictions for the OpCos
  • Partner with the leaders across Meter to Cash to develop bottoms up budget planning/forecasting
  • Drive budget engagement throughout the leaders of the organization to support improved decision making and improved leadership behaviors

Minimum Requirements   

Minimum education required of the position

• Masters degree from an accredited institution or equivalent experience. (Equivalent Experience is defined as demonstrated success at the Director or VP level.)

Minimum experience required of the position

• Direct experience leading a multi-faceted customer service or data analytical function at the executive (e.g. Sr. Manager, Director, VP) level for at least 5+ years. Strong personal relationships with business leaders throughout the Utility. Demonstrated use of LEAN Operating principles.

Minimum knowledge, skills and abilities required of the position

• Strong interpersonal, collaboration, leadership, and analytical skills.
• Demonstrated ability to utilize predictive analytic tools
• Demonstrated deep understanding of LEAN operating principles
• Strong facilitation skills in cross functional environments
• Strong presentation development and delivery skills
• Demonstrated strong work ethic and exceptional levels of accountability, self-drive, and business judgment
• Excellent oral and written communications skills and ability to interact with all levels of the organization.
• Ability to influence at all levels of the organization.   

Any certificates, licenses, etc. required for the position

• None

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Primary Location: Texas-The Woodlands Louisiana : New Orleans || Arkansas : Little Rock || Mississippi : Jackson || Texas : The Woodlands 
Job Function: Professional
FLSA Status: Professional 
Relocation Option: Level I
Union description/code: NON BARGAINING UNIT 
Number of Openings: 1
Req ID: 118810
Travel Percentage:Up to 25%

An Equal Opportunity Employer, Minority/Female/Disability/Vets. Please click here to view the EEI page, or see statements below.

EEO Statement: The Entergy System of Companies provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, amnesty, or status as a protected veteran in accordance with applicable federal, state and local laws. The Entergy System of Companies complies with applicable state and local laws governing non-discrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment including, but not limited to, recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. 

The Entergy System of Companies expressly prohibits any form of unlawful employee harassment based on race, color, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status. Improper interference with the ability of the Entergy System of Company employees to perform their expected job duties is absolutely not tolerated.

Accessibility: Entergy provides reasonable accommodations for online applicants. Requests for a reasonable accommodation may be made orally or in writing by an applicant, employee, or third party on his or her behalf. If you are an individual with a disability and you are in need of an accommodation for the recruiting process please click here and provide your name, contact number, the accommodation requested and the requisition number that you are requesting the accommodation for. Employee Services will contact you regarding your request.

Additional Responsibilities: As a provider of essential services, Entergy expects its employees to be available to work additional hours, to work in alternate locations, and/or to perform additional duties in connection with storms, outages, emergencies, or other situations as deemed necessary by the company. Exempt employees may not be paid overtime associated with such duties.

Equal Opportunity

The non-confidential portions of the affirmative action program for individuals with disabilities and protected veterans shall be available for inspection upon request by any employee or applicant for employment.  Please contact HRCompliance@entergy.com to schedule a time to review the affirmative action plan during regular office hours.

WORKING CONDITIONS:
As a provider of essential services, Entergy expects its employees to be available to work additional hours, to work in alternate locations, and/or to perform additional duties in connection with storms, outages, emergencies, or other situations as deemed necessary by the company. Exempt employees may not be paid overtime associated with such duties.

Please note: Authorization to work in the United States is a precondition to employment in this position. Entergy will not sponsor candidates for work visas for this position.