Principal Consultant - Solution Design - Retail Supply Chain

Senior solution design role in a BPO supply chain practice: owns end-to-end solutions for retail supply chain deals - target operating model, delivery footprint, FTE and pricing construct, transition plan and transformation roadmap - and defends them with the client. 12+ years, based in Pune or Bangalore.

Role at a glance:

Principal Consultant - Solution Design:

Retail supply chain (grocery, fashion, specialty, omnichannel)

Location:

Pune or Bangalore

Experience:

12+ years, of which 4+ in solution design, pre-sales or consulting

Reporting to:

Head of Solutions

Up to 30%, including client sites in North America, Europe and APAC

Purpose of the role:

You own the solution on retail supply chain pursuits - from qualification through to signature, and into the first weeks of transition.

Sales owns the relationship and the commercial close. Delivery owns the run. You own the thing in between: a solution that is credible to the client's supply chain leadership, deliverable by the operations teams who inherit it, and priced so the deal makes money at the margin the business committed to. When those three pull against each other, you make the call and defend it.

The role sits across new logo pursuits, renewals and expansions, and proactive propositions taken to the market.

Key responsibilities:

Deal solutioning and bid leadership:

- Lead the solution workstream on retail supply chain pursuits valued at USD 5M - 50M+ TCV, from qualification through orals and down-select.

- Run discovery and due diligence with client stakeholders: process walkthroughs, volumetric and FTE baselining, system landscape, service levels, pain points and stated business case.

- Write the solution sections of RFI, RFP and proactive proposals; own narrative, assumptions, dependencies and risk register.

- Coordinate the pursuit team across pricing, transition, technology, HR, legal and delivery, and hold them to the bid calendar.

Target operating model design:

- Design the to-be operating model: process scope and splits, onshore - offshore - nearshore footprint, span of control, shift coverage for the client's trading calendar, and the governance layer.

- Build the volumetric and FTE model - productivity assumptions, shrinkage, seasonality uplift for peak trading, and the glide path from transition to steady state.

- Define SLAs, KPIs, service credits and the operating-level agreements that sit beneath them.

Commercial construct and pricing:

- Work with pricing and finance to shape the commercial model: FTE-based, transaction-based, outcome-linked or gainshare, and the productivity commitments that underpin it.

- Test the solution against deal margin thresholds and reprice or rescope where it does not clear them.

- Quantify the client business case - cost-to-serve reduction, working capital release, service improvement - in terms the client's finance team will accept.

Transition and transformation design:

- Design the transition approach: wave plan, knowledge transfer, parallel run, acceptance criteria and risk mitigations.

- Build the transformation roadmap beyond lift-and-shift: process standardisation, control-tower constructs, automation and intelligent document processing, planning-system enablement, analytics and decision support.

- Size the benefit of each lever and show when it lands.

Client engagement and orals:

- Present and defend the solution to client supply chain, procurement and finance leadership, including CxO-level orals and site visits.

- Handle solution-related clarifications, negotiation rounds and best-and-final iterations.

- Hand the signed solution to delivery with a documented baseline, and stay engaged through early transition to keep intent intact.

Practice building:

- Build and maintain reusable assets: solution playbooks, process taxonomies, benchmark libraries, FTE productivity baselines and case collateral.

- Contribute to proactive propositions and market-facing points of view in retail supply chain.

- Coach consultants and senior consultants on the pursuit team.

Retail supply chain domain expertise:

You should be able to hold a working conversation with a retailer's supply chain director without a translator. Depth in at least four of the process areas below, working familiarity with the rest.

Process area:

What you need to know

Demand planning and forecasting:

Statistical forecasting, new product introduction, promotional and event lift, forecast value add, consensus planning cycles

Merchandise and assortment planning:

Range architecture, option and depth planning, OTB, markdown and clearance planning, store clustering

Replenishment and allocation:

Store and DC replenishment, min-max and dynamic safety stock, size and pack allocation, push vs pull

Inventory management:

Multi-echelon positioning, ageing and obsolescence, shrink, stock accuracy and cycle counting, availability vs holding trade-off

Supply and vendor management:

PO lifecycle, vendor onboarding and scorecards, OTIF and fill rate, capacity collaboration, vendor-managed inventory

Logistics and transportation:

Inbound and outbound, DC operations interface, freight audit and pay, carrier allocation, last-mile and reverse logistics

Omnichannel fulfilment:

Ship-from-store, click and collect, order orchestration, inventory visibility across channels, returns

Trade and import:

Import order management, customs documentation, landed cost, origin-to-port lead times

Master data and analytics:

Item, vendor and location master governance; supply chain reporting, exception management and control-tower constructs

Systems and tools:

Hands-on exposure to one or more retail planning and execution platforms and the ERP underneath them. Examples: Oracle Retail, SAP S/4HANA Retail or SAP IBP, Blue Yonder, o9, Kinaxis, RELEX, Anaplan, Manhattan Associates, Korber. You are not expected to configure them; you are expected to know what they do, where they break, and what the BPO layer adds around them.

Automation and digital:

Working command of what can realistically be automated in a retail supply chain back office: RPA, intelligent document processing, workflow and case management, agentic and GenAI-assisted exception handling, and analytics layered on top. Judgement about what is pilot-stage and what is production-ready matters more than tool names.

Experience and qualifications:

Must have:

- 12+ years total experience in supply chain, of which at least 4 in solution design, pre-sales, bid management or management consulting.

- Retail supply chain depth, earned either in-house at a retailer or CPG-to-retail business, or through sustained consulting and outsourcing engagements with retail clients.

- Demonstrable ownership of at least three closed deals or transformation programmes where you built the operating model, the FTE or cost model, and the transition plan.

- Experience designing offshore or hybrid delivery models from India, and a realistic view of what a GCC or BPO site can absorb.

- Comfort with numbers: you build your own volumetric and FTE models in Excel and can defend every assumption in them.

- Client-facing credibility at director and VP level, including orals and due diligence sessions.

- Bachelor's degree in engineering, supply chain, operations or a related field.

Good to have:

- MBA, or a supply chain certification such as APICS CSCP or CPIM, or Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.

- Prior experience in a large BPS or GCC environment - TCS, Genpact, Accenture, Infosys BPM, WNS, Wipro, Capgemini or similar - or on the buy side of such a relationship.

- Exposure to European or North American retail clients and their trading calendars.

- Experience with deal shapes beyond FTE pricing: transaction-based, outcome-linked or gainshare constructs.

- Published points of view, conference speaking or analyst-briefing experience in retail supply chain.

Skills and competencies:

Technical:

- Operating model and process design, including process mapping, standardisation and control design.

- Quantitative modelling: volumetrics, productivity, FTE build-up, cost-to-serve and business-case construction.

- Commercial literacy - deal margin, ramp, one-time costs, productivity commitments and how a pricing construct shifts risk.

- Proposal writing that reads as an argument, not a brochure.

- Advanced Excel and PowerPoint; working knowledge of Visio or Lucid, and of analytics tooling such as Power BI or Tableau.

Behavioural:

- Structured thinking under bid-calendar pressure, with the judgement to decide when a solution is good enough to go.

- Influence without authority across sales, delivery, pricing and legal, and the willingness to say no to a scope that cannot be delivered.

- Executive presence: able to lose a technical argument gracefully and still carry the room.

- Comfort with ambiguity and incomplete client data; disciplined about flagging assumptions rather than hiding them.

- Curiosity about the client's business, not just their process.