Senior Manager, Technical Demand Planning

The Senior Manager of Technical Demand Planning is responsible for building and leading the Demand Planning Center of Excellence (COE), driving the development of new capabilities and best practices in demand planning across the organization. This role involves supporting brand Demand Planners, fostering collaboration, and ensuring the implementation and adoption of new processes and tools. The Sr. Manager will work closely with cross-functional teams, including Supply Chain, Asset Management, Brand Technical Operations, Brand Finance and IT, to optimize forecasting accuracy, support the brand S&OP (Sales & Operations Planning) process to align demand forecasts with business objectives and enable data-driven decision-making. The ideal candidate will have proven leadership experience in demand planning, a passion for process improvement, and the ability to deliver significant business impact

Essential Functions:

Leadership:

• Build and lead the Demand Planning COE, and indirectly manage the brand demand planners

• Establish a clear vision and strategy enabling the brands to deliver on their goals

• Partner with key stakeholders to foster a collaborative working environment that embraces continuous improvement and ownership

• Support and mentor brand demand planners   

• Engage in selling and influencing to build coalitions up, down, and across the organization in the pursuit of delivering business outcomes

• Promote and celebrate team wins!

Develop and Implement Best Practices

• Create and standardize demand planning processes, tools, and methodologies

  • Enable scenario planning and risk management to provide leadership with options and trade-offs

• Automate processes and embrace manage by exception approach to enable planners to focus their time where it matters most

• ork closely with Asset, Maintenance Strategy, and Inventory Control teams to improve accuracy and visibilty to demand signals through the lifecycle

• Collaborate cross-functionally to identify and resolve data quality issues

• Evaluate new data sources and models and their value add to the forecast accuracy

• Identify opportunities to fully leverage planning tool capabiliteis, including statistical, AI and ML.

Support and Facilitate S&OP Process

• Actively promote and champion the S&OP process, ensuring it aligns with organizational goals and is seen as a key driver of successful outcomes.

• Work closely with cross-functional teams to foster a culture of ownership for the process and its outcomes.

• Establish disciplined processes to ensure the fundamental pillars of S&OP are in place, manage conflict, and empower ownership

Benchmarking and Reporting

• Develop and benchmark performance measures to track progress and drive continuous improvement (MAPE, WMAPE, Bias, Value Add, Etc)

• Establish Management reporting highlighting KPI tracking and metrix

• Facilitate brand Demand Review, S&OP, and cross-functional meetings

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities:

• Scope: This role directly enhances operational efficiency and service reliability by ensuring the right technical spare parts are available at the right time and location as efficiently as possible. Problem solving: The successful candidate will possess a broad range of technical competencies and problem solving methods to solve complex supply chain challenges, included but not limited to: Availability Challenges: Ensures critical spare parts are available when needed by improving demand visibility over an extended time horizon. Inventory Inefficiencies: Reduces excess and dead stock through successful execution of demand planning, improving working capital utilization. Cross-Functional Misalignment: Bridges gaps between departments (e.g., finance, procurement, logistics, technical operations) to enable coordinated planning and execution. Operational Disruptions: Facilitates the S&OP  process