Debra Burns

About Debra Burns

Experienced and highly-motivated retail professional passionate about building and driving customer-led strategies to deliver on key financial metrics with operational excellence. Extremely capable at analyzing large datasets, driving process improvements, and encouraging new ways of thinking to improve accuracy and productivity. Skilled communicator passionate about reporting conceptualization and implementation. Adept at creating ad hoc reporting for merchants and leaders to analyze business and sharing out results with stakeholders.

Experience

1. Manager, Merchant Reporting

   Kohl's

   May 2025 — Present

   Partner with senior leaders and cross-functional teams (Strategy, Store Experience, etc.) to define reporting needs, align on KPIs, and translate business strategies into data reporting solutions*Lead requirement gathering and oversee project management of reporting development initiatives, prioritizing numerous requests and ensuring timely delivery of high-impact analytics that optimize merchant decision-making*Collaborate with Business Intelligence Engineers and Enterprise Data Architects to conceptualize reporting framework, validate data accuracy, and ensure timely delivery of reports to stakeholders *Overhauled the communication to merchants of reporting enhancements by introducing a weekly update email and overhauling and significantly growing a reporting knowledge repository with data definitions and best practices to enable knowledge sharing*Analyze company performance to identify trends, outliers, and opportunities, delivering actionable insights that directly inform strategic initiatives and operational improvements*Drive process improvements by collecting user feedback, introducing enhancements that simplify and optimize analytics for end users, and providing training and ongoing support for tools*Serve as a liaison between technical teams and business leaders, ensuring data-driven insights are clearly communicated and aligned with enterprise goals*Ideate and implement reporting to reduce toil for cross-functional partners to accelerate informed decision-making and help them manage their businesses more effectively*Utilize extensive knowledge of planning and merchandising to assist in incorporating and validating data from multiple planning systems*Sought out and utilized training resources to improve skills in Excel, Project Management, AI prompt creation, Power Query, and more

Education

• The Ohio State University

  Bachelor's Degree, Merchandising and Buying Operations

  2005 — 2009

Skills

• Pricing Strategy
• Customer Service
• Retail Category Management
• Trend Analysis
• Pricing
• Retail Replenishment
• Product Assortment Planning
• Style Analysis
• Microsoft Excel
• Fashion
• Purchase Orders
• Merchandise Planning
• Vendor Relations
• Competitive Analysis
• Space Planning
• Oracle Applications
• Microstrategy Reporting
• Advertising
• Microsoft Office
• Sales
• Visual Merchandising
• Sales Analysis
• Financial Planning
• Apparel
• Store Management
• Inventory Analysis
• Merchandising
• Sas
• Retail
• Inventory Management
• Inventory Control
• Planograms
• New Store Planning
• Retail Buying