Shan Kumar has over 24 years of experience in finance and marketing strategy with top tier US retailers. He was most recently the VP of Category Marketing and Planning at Albertsons. He initiated the company's first ever collaborative marketing planning with suppliers (came to be known as ACBP)and develop multi-year product segment business plans. He led the company's efforts to streamline category management with changes to organizational structure, incentives and new pricing & promotional planning tools. He also led the centralization of the pricing function and establishing pricing strategies. He deployed the Khimetrics price optimization tool successfully in two divisions. Prior to Albertsons he was at Safeway for 16 years where he successfully led their SCOP category management efforts to establish marketing strategies by product lines and growing identical store sales. He has held progressively senior positions in Corporate Marketing Planning, Financial Planning and Analysis and Corporate Strategy divisions. He has an MBA in Finance from the Wharton Business School.