Senior Partner – Transformation — Fulfilment And Customer-Care System

The mandate

Retail clients have added pickup, ship-from-store, endless aisle, remote selling and cross-channel returns to networks designed primarily for in-person trade. Stores absorb picking, packing, staging and service work that is rarely reflected in labour plans or channel economics. Customer-care teams resolve inventory and delivery failures after the fact, often without authority to fix the underlying promise. Digital growth appears in one account while store labour, rework and remedy appear in another. Boards are asking for a joined transformation that neither channel function can lead alone.

The advisory firm is appointing a Senior Partner – Transformation to build and lead that work from Dubai. The appointee will advise chief executives, operating leaders and boards on service model, store work, fulfilment, customer care, organisation, technology adoption and economics. They will originate significant relationships, shape multidisciplinary engagements and remain accountable from diagnostic through stabilisation. The purpose is not to sell a generic omnichannel programme; it is to help each client decide what its stores and care system should actually do.

This is a planned new leadership seat. The firm has relevant retail, operations and digital capability, but needs a partner who can combine it around real customer journeys. The successful executive will be willing to recommend that a digital promise be narrowed, that a store role be funded properly or that an apparently efficient central process be returned closer to the customer.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in Dubai, the Senior Partner reports to the Global Managing Partner and regional partner council. They can draw on approximately 825 employees and material partners across retail strategy, operations, digital product, organisation, data, finance and implementation. A focused transformation team will be developed around senior practitioners with both line and advisory credibility.

Client environments include grocery, fashion, premium retail, speciality chains, department stores and marketplaces with physical service points. Store layouts, labour models, product characteristics and customer promises differ. A pickup process suitable for packaged goods may fail in fitting, freshness or high-value categories. The practice must begin with the work and customer expectation rather than a standard channel benchmark.

Customer care is a source of operating evidence, not merely a cost centre. Contacts reveal inventory inaccuracy, unclear promise, product content gaps, delivery failure and store authority limits. Transformation must connect contact reasons to upstream ownership while preserving effective remedy during change. Reducing contacts by making access harder will not be accepted as value.

First-year agenda

The Senior Partner will first review existing credentials, relationships, active work and delivery capability. They will identify where the firm has changed service and economics, where implementation stalled and which client situations merit priority. The outcome should be a clear proposition around store-enabled fulfilment and care transformation, supported by leaders who can deliver it.

On each engagement, the team will map representative journeys from customer promise to completion and remedy. Work, waiting, handoff, information, labour, inventory, space and decision authority will be observed directly. Economics will include incremental demand, contribution, store labour, packaging, delivery, returns, rework and customer loss. The diagnostic should reveal whether the problem sits in proposition, process, capacity, data or management.

The Senior Partner will help clients select a service model by store and journey archetype. Some locations may fulfil broad digital demand; others may offer pickup and returns only; some may remain primarily experiential. Customer care may retain central scale while specialist or local teams resolve defined issues. Each choice will state service, staffing, space, technology, accountability and financial consequence.

Implementation will occur through focused waves. A wave may redesign store picking and staging, give care teams visibility and remedy authority, change order-routing rules or separate appointment-based service from general demand. Front-line colleagues will test the work before scale. Benefits will be measured against a baseline that includes demand, quality and customer consequence, not labour minutes alone.

Within twelve months, the Senior Partner should have led at least one major client programme into live operation, built a credible senior bench and established a portfolio of evidence showing repeatable impact without templated answers. The practice must be known for staying through adoption and correcting its own design when operations disprove an assumption.

Leadership responsibilities

The appointee will own executive dialogue, scope, quality, economics and risk on the most consequential assignments. They will ensure engagements have accountable client owners, access to operational evidence and authority to change promise as well as process. When client leadership seeks only headcount savings, the partner must show the service consequence or decline an unsupported value claim.

Inside the firm, the Senior Partner will develop people who can move between board economics and store-level work. Teams should include product, data and people expertise without becoming unwieldy. Apprenticeship, credit sharing and client-capability transfer will be explicit leadership responsibilities.

The role will contribute to partnership governance, including conflicts, quality, succession and intellectual capital. Tools may accelerate journey mapping, labour analysis or benefit tracking, but they cannot substitute for client-specific observation. The Partner will prevent proprietary client process or data from being reused improperly.

Measures of success

Client outcomes may include completed-order contribution, pickup readiness, store pick quality, inventory accuracy, return resolution, contact recurrence, first-contact resolution, labour productivity and customer effort. Benefit claims will include technology, training, transition and service consequences. Changes should remain effective after advisory teams leave.

The partnership will assess realised impact, engagement contribution, trusted references, responsible repeat work, senior-team development and collaboration. Risk measures include scope disputes, implementation harm, unsupported attribution and confidentiality. Presentation quality and proposal value will not compensate for weak operating adoption.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring at least 28 years across retail operations, fulfilment, customer service, transformation or senior advisory leadership. They must have led physical and digital operating change across multiple sites and countries, with accountable financial and customer outcomes. A pure strategy or technology-programme background will be insufficient.

The board will seek examples of changing a digital promise because store work could not support it, redesigning customer care to eliminate upstream failure and allocating different operating roles to store archetypes. Candidates should understand labour planning, inventory, order orchestration, returns and service economics in practice.

The successful partner will be credible with front-line leaders and boards, willing to test advice in operation and comfortable revising a design. They must originate work without overstating transferability and build successors who can hold senior client relationships. International and Middle East retail experience is valuable.

Compensation and appointment terms

The indicative annual base is AED 2,350,000–3,400,000, with performance-linked and long-term participation reflecting partnership contribution. Entry structure will recognise verified client impact, responsible origination and team leadership. Mobility, deferred remuneration and any path to broader profit participation will be considered in final negotiations.

Confidentiality

The advisory firm is unnamed because the role intersects with active client transformations and internal growth plans. Detailed governance and opportunity information will be released after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Candidates must anonymise client journeys, financial baselines and proprietary materials in their applications.