Demand Planner

Russell Stover Chocolates - Kansas City, MO

Full-time

Kansas City, MO

Food and Beverage Retailers

About the position

As a Demand Planner at Russell Stover Chocolates, you will play a crucial role in the Supply Chain Planning team, focusing on developing accurate forecasts and maintaining high forecast accuracy to support production planning and inventory management. This position involves leveraging external data sources to enhance cross-functional planning processes and collaborating with various departments to drive business results.

Responsibilities

• Maintain the statistical forecast model and sales input to facilitate a consensus forecast.
• Improve forecast accuracy by accounting for seasonality, new items, new customers, promotional activity, and other market factors.
• Align demand plans to business objectives through understanding Seasonal, Base, Promotional, New Product, and Cannibalization processes.
• Support Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) cycle meeting series by pulling data, conducting analysis, building PowerPoints, and facilitating conversation and resolution of planning opportunities with account managers and senior leadership.
• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration and alignment with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain, and IT to drive business results in planning, execution, and risks/opportunities.
• Prepare and present demand analytics including missed business/lost sales, forecast accuracy and bias, customer sell-through, monthly and annual pacing, and demand/supply balancing.
• Develop alerts, reports, and predictive models to support the organization in identifying potential gaps and issues before they arise.
• Drive Production Planning and Inventory Management strategies to improve customer fill rates and minimize excess inventory.
• Support demand planning initiatives to drive continuous improvement in global demand planning processes, systems, and integration into the business.
• Participate in global projects that support 'Best Practice' alignment of Lindt, Ghirardelli, and Russell Stover supply chain systems/processes.
• Support Vendor Management processes/initiatives as needed.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or 2 years of experience in Supply Chain, Statistics, Financial Planning, or Market Analysis.
• Experience using SAP and/or SAP-Integrated Business Planning IBP.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint skills.
• Analytical, critical thinking, and multi-tasking skills.
• Strong interpersonal skills, must be able to work cross-functionally at various levels of the organization.

Nice-to-haves

• At least 5 years of experience in Supply Chain, Planning, or a highly technical role.
• Experience using customer data portals, IRI, or other external market intelligence tools.
• Expertise in a programming language such as SQL, VBA, or Python.
• Experience building dashboards using Business Intelligence tools, such as Tableau, SAP Analytics Cloud, Power BI, etc.
• Ability to work directly with Russell Stover customers—must possess leadership qualities and the ability to maintain/build customer relationships.
• Experience working in the CPG industry.
• APICS, IBF, or any type of forecasting certification.

Benefits

• Equal employment opportunities without regard to race, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, religion, gender, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, protected medical condition, genetic information, military service, veteran status, or any other status or characteristic protected by law.