Royal Canin Head of Data Foundation and Governance

• The RC Head of Data Foundation and Governance is a pivotal role that sits at the intersection of product strategy and data management. Operating within a matrixed organization, this role requires close collaboration with cross-functional teams. It leads a team of “Data Domain Leads”, who are accountable for defining and executing the data strategy within their assigned domain, in collaboration with Regional Data Leads, ensuring that data assets are effectively delivered, governed, and leveraged to drive business value.
• This role demands a blend of Data strategic vision, business and technical acumen, and operational leadership and will play a critical role in enabling our transition towards an AI-ready, Product-Led organization.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and nurture relationships across Royal Canin, MGS, Corporate and the PetCare businesses ecosystem to ensure direct participation in the relevant strategic forums to shape, influence and articulate and align key Data opportunity areas.
• Strategic Data Management

• Define and execute the vision, strategy, and roadmap for the assigned analytical data domains in alignment with organizational goals and in partnership with the Master Data Organisation.
• Collaborate with business and IT stakeholders to prioritize data initiatives based on business value and strategic alignment.
• Anticipate the data needs of product squads to unlock faster speed to value and insight.
• Promote data as a strategic asset within the domains and across the organization.

• Data Governance, Quality, and Metadata Management Orchestration:

• Ensure data quality management is applied across domains, including defining metrics, monitoring processes, and remediating issues.
• Ensure compliance with relevant regulations and internal policies, such as GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific standards.
• Define and continuously improve data stewardship practices, facilitate adherence to data governance frameworks, policies, and standards and guide the evolution of data standards, and execution of data quality.
• Collaborate with legal and compliance teams to address ethical considerations related to data use in AI.
• Collaborate with Masterdata team and Master Data Governance teams to setup an end to end data governance model.

• Data Delivery

• Drive the development and maintenance of data assets across and within domains (e.g., master data, analytical data, transactional data, reference data etc.).
• Ensure the metadata is captured, curated, and maintained overtime so it stays FAIR i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
• Partner with data engineering teams to implement scalable data solutions.

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• Stakeholder Management

• Act as the primary point of contact for data-related matters across domains.
• Work closely with Product Directors, Product Managers, Functional leaders and Business analysts to understand requirements and translate them into actionable plans.
• Work closely with business data owners and stewards, ensuring data governance practices are applied across the organization.
• Ensure transparency in data priorities, progress, and decision-making.

• Continuous Improvement

• Oversee data lifecycle management, including acquisition, storage, transformation, and archiving processes.

Context and Scope

• Royal Canin is undergoing a significant Digital Transformation journey. Our ability to solve the most critical problems across Mars in a User Centric way through Data & Analytics is fundamental to our growth ambition and transformation. Significant early success in this journey, and the introduction of many critical foundational capabilities, means that we are looking to accelerate our ability to solve problems and ultimately drive value for Mars Inc.
• The opportunities are significant for Mars, and the opportunities for those working in this space are both hugely exciting and rewarding. Connecting and deriving break-through insight from our Royal Canin and Petcare data ecosystems, leveraging the rapidly growing world of external data to get closer to our customers and consumers than ever before, and unlocking efficiencies and automation across our End-To-End Value Chain.
• The Head of Data Foundation and Governance will define and manage the Royal Canin end-to-end “Analytics Data” Mesh Strategy and Roadmap and shape a fit-for-purpose enterprise approach to building reusable, scalable and interoperable data assets, that will enable data-driven decision-making and innovation across the division & the Petcare ecosystem.
• The job holder will be instrumental in helping to establish, support and reinforce the de-centralized architecture that simplifies the processing, organization, and governance of data achieving scalable, and interoperable data foundations to enable better decisions today and unlock AI at scale tomorrow.
• This role will partner close with Royal Canin Master Data leadership, PetCare, MGS and Corporate Data leadership to drive a coherent, lock-step approach across the complete hierarchy of data.
• Starting with key business problems and long term strategic planning, the Head of Data Foundation and Governance will partner with Data & Analytics Leaders across Global, Regional, Markets across the end-to-end value chain, to identify & shape the foundational and enabling data roadmaps, prioritizing and adapting delivery to strike the optimal balance between immediate needs and long-term strategic objectives
• This role will be in lockstep with the key transformational programs such as EOS program (Salesforce/CRM, OMP/Planning and SAP S4/ERP) to drive a joint approach across Data Domain definitions and alignment and Governance anticipating how these will evolve and the impact on our data capture, structures and alignment at RC and PetCare level.

Job Specifications/Qualifications

Education & Professional Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Management, Business Administration, STEM subjects, or related field. Master’s level advantageous.
• Overall, 10-15 years of experience; Minimum 5 years of experience in Data & Analytics
• Minimum 2 years of Analytics experience in the CPG industry

Qualifications & Competencies

• Strategic inquiry to identify the underlying needs of the enterprise, influencing the organization to embrace new methods and technologies, with a strong track record operating at the intersection of data, technology, and business strategy.
• Partner heavily with Digital leaders in the business, Product Delivery and other Enablement functions, and with functional experts to define robust data governance practices.
• Technical breadth to identify and apply art-of-the-possible with Data, Analytics and AI & ensure knowledge and best practices sharing across segments to ensure reusability and improving ecosystem maturity.
• Partner with enterprise architects, Mars and Petcare data governance teams, across the entire Data & Analytics maturity spectrum – Descriptive, Predictive & Prescriptive.

Knowledge / Experience

• Expertise in cloud-based data platforms, data engineering, and architecture.
• Experience leading large-scale data infrastructure and Engineering teams.
• Deep knowledge of data modeling, ETL, Data Lakes, Data Warehousing, Lakehouses.
• Experience with various data governance, catalog and quality tools such as Collibra, Informatica, SAP, and/or Microsoft Purview
• Experience with Master Data Management, SAP MDG and core data Strong understanding of data security, governance, and compliance frameworks.
• Hands-on experience with modern data technologies (Ideally Microsoft Azure stack).
• Proven ability to drive cross-functional international teams, with strong collaboration skills and strategic alignment mindset.
• Experience advantageous in technology/source systems (Salesforce, SAP ERP, Azure, SQL, Hive, PowerBI, React)

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