Strategic Demand Planning Lead - Remote

Nestlé S.A.; Bridgewater Township (NJ); Remote; USD 90,000 - 121,000; Full time

Job summary

Nestlé Health Science in the United States is seeking a Senior Demand Planning Specialist (Remote) to own the Demand Plan for Nature’s Bounty in the US, ensuring accurate forecasts and robust MBP processes.

You will champion the Monthly Business Planning, collaborate with Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations, and drive improvements in forecast accuracy across channels and customers.

Qualifications

• High School Diploma required; Bachelor's degree strongly preferred.
• At least 4 years of experience in one of the functions is strongly preferred: Demand & Supply Planning; Supply Chain Development; Procurement; Physical Logistics; Customer Service; Sales & Marketing; Finance.
• Planning experience in the area of demand planning.

Responsibilities

• Generate and maintain the Demand Plan for the business unit at the levels (customer and product hierarchy & time) at which the decisions are taken, appropriately considering recent events.
• Understand Demand Planning key performance metrics and targets.
• Consistently improves Demand Plan Accuracy and drives out systematic forecast bias through detailed root cause analysis on past performance, maintaining an efficient learning log.
• Effectively uses all Demand Planning system functionalities to enable an exception based management approach. Implement improvements to the Demand Planning processes and tools to deliver tangible benefits (e.g. time saving, efficiencies).
• Contributes to the cross-functional planning activities according to best practices and ensures necessary preparation and follow up actions for the Monthly Business Planning meetings are completed in due time.
• Makes recommendations on the baseline forecast for the business unit and defends the appropriate changes to the Consensus Demand Plan (CDP).
• Captures, prioritizes and analyses forecast assumptions used in the consensus demand plan, such as Marketing and Sales events, customer, consumer and competitor information, product launches and related cannibalization with impact to the demand plan.
• Analyses actual sales to Customers and sell-out (e.g. POS, if available) data to identify exceptional and un-forecasted activities, challenging the appropriate groups to help explain deviations to forecast. Use findings to drive timely and appropriate actions to minimize the impact of deviations from the Demand Plan.
• Presents outcomes for the Monthly Business Planning process to leadership and get buy-in from the relevant stakeholders.
• Through systematic reporting, ensures the latest Demand Plan is readily available to internal business partners as required.
• Holds meetings with Sales to review past performance of key distributors and identify gaps/changes to their actual sales in vs their trace sales out.
• Facilitate meetings with Sales to review upcoming contract wins/losses, identifying phasing, timing, run rate, quantity, etc and validating with Business Operations that actuals are coming in as planned. Clearly review what’s in the CDP with the broader commercial team for alignment and agreement, and work with Finance to identify which initiatives should be included in the DF.
• Actively participates in Demand Planning functional meetings with other business units to share experiences and best practices.
• Cascades knowledge of Demand Planning Best Practices and tools to other Demand planners, new hires and cross-functional teams.

Skills

Influence others

Demand forecasting

Process improvement

Analytical skills

Communication skills

Time management

Creative thinking

Education

High school diploma

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Nestlé Health Science in the United States is seeking a Senior Demand Planning Specialist (Remote) to own the Demand Plan for Nature’s Bounty in the US, ensuring accurate forecasts and robust MBP processes.

You will champion the Monthly Business Planning, collaborate with Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations, and drive improvements in forecast accuracy across channels and customers.