Demand Planner

Who we are

TR Fastenings (TR) is part of Trifast plc is a leading international specialist in the design, engineering, manufacture, and distribution of high-quality industrial fastenings and Category 'C' components principally to major global assembly industries. It supplies to some 5,000 customers in 75 countries worldwide, serving a range of industries including Automotive, Smart Infrastructure, Medical, General Industrial and Distributors.

We are looking to recruit a Demand Planner on a permanent basis to join our Supply Chain team based at our National Distribution Centre in Walsall (WS2 8DQ
).

We are looking for an experienced, analytical, and commercially aware Demand Planner to join our supply chain team at the National Distribution Centre in Walsall. This is a newly created role and an important opportunity to establish a strong demand planning capability within the business. The business requires someone with clear, proven demand planning experience who can bring forecasting expertise, structure, and best practice to support a more proactive, data-led planning approach.

The successful candidate will help the business operate from a single, trusted view of demand, supporting effective supply planning, purchasing, inventory management, customer service, and operational decision-making.

• Help define and embed demand planning processes, governance, reporting, and best practice for this new role within the business.
• Lead the demand planning process, ensuring assumptions, risks, opportunities, and recommendations are clearly communicated to stakeholders.
• Analyse customer order history, customer forecasts, call-off order demand, seasonality, market trends, product lifecycle information, and customer & supplier shutdown impacts.
• Use approved AI tools to convert customer forecasts into the required format, ensuring outputs are reviewed and validated before upload to D365.
• Review forecast variance with Sales and key stakeholders, ensuring gaps, risks, and opportunities are understood and reflected in the demand plan. Hand over a clear, agreed demand plan to Material Planning to support purchasing, safety stock, lead time, reorder point, and inventory decisions.
• Use demand and inventory segmentation techniques, such as ABC/XYZ analysis, to prioritise planning focus, improve forecast accuracy, and support appropriate inventory strategies.
• Monitor forecast accuracy, bias, service, stock health, inventory turns, excess stock, and obsolete inventory, identifying root causes and driving continuous improvement.
• Contribute to the S&OP process, presenting insights and actions to protect service, capacity, and stock availability.

You will be a confident and experienced demand planning professional with strong analytical capability, excellent attention to detail, and the ability to turn data into clear insight and practical actions. You will bring hands-on demand planning knowledge and be comfortable working cross-functionally, challenging assumptions constructively, influencing stakeholders, and helping the business build stronger demand planning discipline.

• 5+ years’ clear demand planning experience, with demonstrable experience owning, developing, or significantly improving a demand planning process. General material planning experience alone will not be sufficient for this role.
• Experience in a manufacturing, distribution, industrial, or fast-paced supply chain environment.
• Strong understanding of demand planning principles, including forecasting, seasonality, customer demand, product lifecycle management, and inventory control.
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills and confidence analysing large and complex datasets.
• Confident using Power BI or similar…