Demand Manager

JOB SUMMARY:

Responsible for Demand Planning for total business. Partner with Operations, Sales, Finance and SCM with the primary goal of balancing the competing objectives of maximizing customer service, minimizing supply chain costs, optimizing working capital and leading the Demand Planning team.  This Demand Planning position is responsible for all forecasting activities associated with customers and products. The Demand Planning Manager creates and maintains forecast models for their customers, incorporating business intelligence and forecast information gathered from sales, marketing, finance, and other sources

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITES:

• Proactively lead Global Planning activities by being the focal point of communication with the BU and Operations leaders.
• Coach, mentor and manage performance of direct reports.
• Design, coordinate and publish periodic reports pertaining to forecast / inventory and operations relevant to current business requirements.
• Balance and assign workload for the team.
• Manage escalations through to completion and communicate accordingly.
• Manages Sales & Operations Planning Process in collaboration with SCM, Sales and Operations.
• Work with Operations to ensure capacity levels are managed in support of the master production schedule.
• Facilitate collaboration with cross-functional teams to maintain standardized operating procedures.
• Manages inventory levels in assigned regions and business units working closely with operations, sales and product line management for supply chain optimization.
• Engage in NPI activities with Engineering, Sales and PLM to support speed to market initiatives.
• Measure, support and develop local entity planners.
• Manage system parameters for entire Product Life Cycle.
• Work closely with procurement and vendors in managing contract manufacturing products where applicable.
• Balance global supply and capacity to provide the highest level of customer service and operational efficiency.
• Ability to travel globally.

Key Deliverables and Metrics:

• A customer demand forecast which incorporates current and accurate market information that allows the company to correctly predict customer demand and provide its supply chain with the appropriate information to plan how to meet that customer demand.
• Improved relationships among planners, sales, marketing and finance, which will lead to effective knowledge sharing and an optimal consensus forecast to better guide the company.
• Refined systems and methods to continually improve forecasts so that the company can better anticipate customer needs.
• Execute with excellence in the area of customer replenishment and feedback to the Supply Chain group the opportunities and risks regarding customer replenishment performance metrics.
• Metrics examples:
  • Forecast Attainment- How much of the forecast we actually attained, in essence a comparison of Sales to Forecast from a prior period
  • Forecast Bias- Sum of signed forecast errors over either actual or forecast
  • Mean Absolute Percent Error- The traditional MAPE used by academics to infer the quality of the model or Model Fit. 
  • Weighted Absolute Percent Error- The Classic Weighted MAPE used to measure the SKU level forecast error in most supply chains – volume weighted.
  • Mean Percent Error- An average of individual SKU level MAPEs, not a very useful measure
  • Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)- Average of squared errors, a more rigorous measure since it weights higher errors more heavily
  • Rolling out-of-sample errors- You calculate the average error of the same forecast at different lags using different hold-out samples in each run of the forecast