Background & Purpose of the Job

This role supports the North America Cooking Aids and Mini Meals (CAMM) business, located in Hoboken, NJ. It reports to the CAMM Network Planning Manager. The Strategic Planner is an important player for the category since they will develop the long-term Supply Chain strategies to create value for the category within the existing and future portfolios.

The Strategic Planner will lead NA long term capacity planning for the Independence, Lerma, Mexico Unilever factories and several collaborative manufacturing partners, and they will implement sourcing changes for those factories.  This person will closely collaborate with LATAM teams on long-term planning of Lerma, Mexico factories. They will determine the best portfolio of products to run at each site while developing sound business cases to support category growth, savings delivery, and service improvement following the strategic principles and ensuring the optimal E2E network design. In addition, they will manage sourcing change projects, evaluate network constraints (i.e. – materials), identify improvement opportunities, review capex and technology needs, identify complexity reduction initiatives, and strategic project scoping and execution—all towards an optimal network design and gross margin. 

This person will work as part of the Foods supply chain sourcing for Cooking Aids and Mini Meals (Knorr, Lipton Soups, Bovril, Oxo, and Food Solutions brands) and will closely interact with Brand, Supply/Demand Planning, Factory Teams, Finance, Procurement and R&D to deliver the category business targets. They will also lead the charge on major supply chain sourcing decisions with the senior stakeholders in supply chain leadership forums. 

Who You Are & What You’ll Do

·         You’re a strategy guru: You not only understand what the sourcing network needs to be today, but more importantly what it needs to be tomorrow.  You can balance multiple tradeoffs and priorities to arrive at the best solution for Unilever. 

·         You’re a dot connector: You can see the impact of process choices on down-stream and up-stream activities in the end-to-end supply chain. 

·         You love to win, and have fun doing it: We make big choices on investments and capital that have impact for years down the road. You must be bold in the recommendations, always working with a win-win mind-set.  

·         You’re a changemaker: Some of the things that work today, will not work in the future. You are often the first to recognize the strategy of the future and will need to bring others along the journey. 

Key Responsibilities 

·         Lead the long term (+1Yr to +3Yrs) capacity planning for Independence and several collaborative manufacturers and collaborate with the LATAM team on the long term capacity planning for Lerma, Mexico factories through supply chain modeling 

·         Project management and implementation of sourcing changes for those factories 

·         Brainstorm, develop, and lead project ideas, including business case analysis, defining capex, and cost savings for project execution through your partner teams (engineering, finance, etc.) 

·         Perform capacity modeling for ancillary supply chain network (materials, logistics, etc.) using optimization and analytical techniques 

·         Support complexity reduction and savings in product portfolio and overall network 

What You’ll Need to Succeed