Vice President, Business Intelligence & Advanced Analytics, PetSmart

Elpida Ormanidou is the Vice President, Analytics & Insights at PetSmart. As the leader of this newly formed organization, Elpida works closely with departments across the enterprise to leverage internal and external data assets to drive strategic business decisions and enable an optimal customer experience across all touchpoints. Since joining PetSmart, Elpida has successfully lead efforts that extract actionable insights to increase business performance and leverage customer and category data to develop new quantitative capabilities and help enhance their ability to drive share of wallet with Pet Parents. Elpida’s team utilizes leading data science and advanced analytics techniques to influence customer lifecycle marketing, personalization, new product & service development, supply chain, pricing, and HR staffing optimization. Elpida’s primary objective is to develop and maintain the enterprise data and analytics strategy in support of the overall PetSmart strategy and create, communicate, and maintain an inspiring and clear framework, roadmap, and architecture for PetSmart’s machine learning and data platform technology.

Prior to PetSmart, Elpida was at Starbucks serving as the Vice President, Data Science since November 2019. Elpida and her team spearheaded transformational efforts across multiple domains and lead the “Next Generation Personalization” initiative, which capitalized on a home-built recommendation engine. Prior to that Elpida served as Senior Vice President at Chico’s FAS where she established AIMS (Analytics, Insights, and Measurement Sciences), the Data Science division that delivered advanced analytics capability as a competitive advantage.

Elpida also spent over 12 years with Walmart. She started her career at Sam’s Club as a member trends analyst and, with a team of internal and external scientists, developed the analytical framework resulting in a member-centric organizational view, as well as a product recommendation engine personalizing member offers. She then worked as a senior pricing manager, before moving to Walmart U.S. and growing into a Global People Analytics leadership role, tasked with standing-up a team to standardize HR data analysis processes, making it faster and more accurate while ensuring confidentiality and data integrity.

When not analyzing data, Elpida enjoys travelling with her daughter, visiting museums and art exhibits, and spending quality time with a good book.