Demand Planning Manager

At Gentex Corporation, we’ve created an environment where great ideas and great people can thrive. Leveraging a history that spans over 130 years, Gentex is a global leader in personal protection and situational awareness solutions for defense forces, emergency responders, and industrial personnel operating in high performance environments. Join our multinational team of exceptional and dedicated employees around the world and work on challenging and rewarding projects, grow your skills, and advance your career all while making a positive difference in the lives of our customers.

Together, you and Gentex can build a career that’s uniquely yours.

About the Job:

The Demand Planning Manager is responsible for ensuring supply chain efficiency and meeting customer expectations through accurate forecasting and planning globally across 5 US and UK locations. The ideal candidate excels at cross-functional collaboration, has a strong analytical mindset, and demonstrates effective leadership skills to guide a team toward high performance. Ability to work closely with a wide range of stakeholders, meet deadlines while delivering high-quality data and information.

In summary, this role is to be responsible for helping the business optimize finished goods levels and replenishment plans such that inventory and costs are minimized while a superior customer experience level is maintained. This will be achieved by working closely with Operations, Customer Service and Sales teams to determine and monitor the planned and actual finished goods levels, customer satisfaction and other key business metric targets.

Essential Functions:

• Define, implement and operate integrated, automated and IT systems to deliver desired results (current primary system tools are SAP, Salesforce, QLIK, and MS Excel).
• Work with Product Management and Business Development to develop a long-term planning horizon across the aircrew portfolio.
• Liaise with engineering and operations on the configuration management of assembled products to streamline cycle times from quotation to delivery
• Participate actively in corporate initiatives related to ERP improvements
• Monitor sales forecasts and order bookings to sense and implement changes to finished goods plans
• Responsible for managing finished goods inventory to support elevated levels of customer satisfaction.
• Establish lead times based on customer requirements and liaise with Operations to ensure lead times are met
• Review impact of forecasts on capacity (globally and domestically) and liaise with Operations to ensure optimal Manufacturing capacity is available as required
• Liaise with Operations to ensure external Supply Chain planning will support the planned level of Customer Experience
• Manage finished goods inventory within agreed budgeted levels
• Realize cost saving opportunities and areas to increase efficiency of the inventory management system and to cut costs.
• Confer with other managers outside of inventory management to ensure coordination of other functions such as production, supply chain management and quality assurance.
• Develop use of metrics for key performance indicators (Inventory Turns, Forecast Accuracy, and performance relative to inventory targets) and ensure improvement initiatives are developed and implemented.
• Ability to learn on the fly and identify gaps and areas for improvement

Education:

Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration or a Supply Chain related field

Experience:

The Ideal candidate will have 10+ years of strong Supply Chain background, with experience creating forecasts, inventory analysis, budget preparation, SIOP, and an overall a strongly data driven mindset. Prior in the Aerospace/Military, Consumer or Automotive centric background in inventory management and logistics planning is ideal as well. Extensive experience in defining, monitoring and improving the people, processes and tools within supply chain to deliver desired results is a must.

7+ years of Distribution/Logistics/Inventory management experience in high volume manufacturing facilities is a plus.

Knowledge &

Skills:

Must be able to perform the following:

• Supply chain knowledge with diverse experience in…