Job Code: 35717 
 

Job Description:
 

The Demand Planner is responsible for creating and maintaining a demand plan for assigned business segments and running all processes associated with the creation of an accurate demand signal to drive the supply chain.

The Demand Planner is responsible for incorporating key business intelligence into the demand signal, including insights and inputs from marketing, sales, and finance along with data intelligence reports.

The Demand Planner is the key integration point into the marketing and commercial organization.   This position leads the dialogue each month for their respective customers and products with key counterparts in Marketing and Sales. 

This role can be based in any of the three corporate offices: Oakbrook,Toronto, Florenceville.

Essential Duties and responsibilities

• Generate a demand plan at multiple levels of aggregation and for multiple time horizons.
• Drives the monthly consensus process for assigned business segments linking with commercial partners to evaluate and align on monthly volumes by sku/category for the next 3 months and 12 months.
• Update the demand plan to be reflective of marketing and commercial assumptions and inputs.
• Lead continues improvement in forecast accuracy.   Identify process and systems gaps.  Identify leading causes of forecast error with the corresponding deployment of improvement initiatives to prevent future occurrence
• Accountable for meeting forecast accuracy KPI targets.  Maintain and publish demand planning metrics - manage and drive improvement plans across various levels of forecast aggregation and multiple time horizons.
• Has a good understanding of related supply chain processes and the impact demand planning has on them.
• Manage the communication flow of changes to forecast and disseminates information to all stakeholders accordingly.
• Use and maintain SAP IBP as primary forecasting system.
• Create and accurately maintain master data designated fields for assigned portfolio.
• Manage statistical forecast exceptions by utilizing alerts, reports, and other analyses to identify and correct potential outliers.
• Prepare for and facilitate demand consensus planning activities including generating and publishing reports, coordinating and leading cross functional meetings, using a collaborative approach to develop and improve the consensus forecast.
• Review, scrub and analyze the forecast through scrutiny of variances, historical sales trends including rolling averages, year over year data, research of demand drivers, and other customer and market related changes.
• Accountable for acquiring the skills to retrieve relevant data from various systems; ability to create own reports.
• Accountable to generate and/or execute the various weekly and/or monthly processes and reports assigned in support of continuous improvement and forecast quality.

Education and experience:

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Supply Chain, Statistics or related discipline
• At least 2-5 yrs. experience in Demand planning, forecasting, supply planning Experience. Experience with a CPG company a plus 
• Excellent analytical, statistical, and organizational skills. Must be detailed oriented and highly organized.
• Able to think through and analyze large amount of data, models and results
• High proficiency in tools used for data analysis such as Excel
• Ability to lead and influence other in reaching a consensus forecast.
• Experience with facilitation of Forecast Consensus discussions.
• Effective communication skills (both oral and written) with the ability to interact with multiple departments and all levels of the organization