Demand Planner

Summary

Join Fender Musical Instruments Corporation as a Demand Planner and contribute to the development and maintenance of accurate short, mid, and long-term forecasts. This role ensures supply aligns with customer demand, adhering to budgeted inventory policies. You will independently build and maintain service levels within the Supply Chain, collaborating with partners and third-party warehouses. Leading improvement projects within Planning and Supply Chain is also a key responsibility. The position requires strong analytical skills, proficiency in demand planning tools, and excellent communication abilities. Success in this role involves balancing demand with supply, managing inventory, and working closely with various teams to optimize forecasting and supply chain processes.

Requirements

• Graduate calibre with proven experience of Demand Planning and/or Inventory Planning
• Strong PC skills with experience of Microsoft packages
• Commercial and financial awareness and acumen
• A self-starter who needs limited guidance as to what/how to analyse data. Curious with a desire to get to the root cause
• Develop tools/spreadsheets/processes to aid in data analysis and to understand and optimise/improve processes; make recommendations for changes
• Comfortable communicating across multiple layers in the organisation, can deliver 'bad news' and resolve differing points of view

Responsibilities

• Balancing demand with supply while keeping within inventory targets, using relevant demand planning and supply planning tools
• Work closely with Sales & Product Managers to reduce Excess and Obsolete Inventory
• Manage supply issues and develop alternative plans where delivery schedules cannot be improved
• Working with Sales, Product Managers and Marketing to review and agree on demand forecasts, complementing system generated forecasts
• Monitor trends in customer orders against forecast and identify availability improvements
• KPI reporting and control analysis on measures such as (but not limited to) Inventory, Forecast Accuracy, Fill Rate, Slow Moving, New Product Introduction and Excess Inventory
• Ability to document processes, write training material for any reporting/tools created
• Develop relationships with various functions to obtain data, learn business processes; be the advocate for supply chain in any additional reporting/tools needed
• Play an active role in supporting the monthly SIOP process, being the back up for the Supply Chain Manager in key process meetings

Preferred Qualifications

• SAP experience a plus
• Experience with Amazon and BTC a plus
• Experience with Data Science techniques such as, but not limited to, Decision Tree, Linear and Logistic Regression, Naïve Bayes, k-Means and Neural Networks a plus
• Working knowledge of Logility (or similar) planning software