Demand Planner - KSA

Key Responsibilities:

• Work with Demand Planning Manager to manage various sales forecasting processes, monitor and assess effectiveness of those processes and drive continuous improvements.
• Develop demand forecasts (operational & tactical forecasts) at multiple levels of aggregation (by customer and by SKU) for multiple time horizons (up to 24 months / 105 weeks) as part of demand planning process.
• Maintain demand forecast with horizon of minimum 24 months at customer and SKU level in ERP System.
• Review historical sales trends, research on demand drivers, prepare forecast data, develop statistical demand forecast templates and evaluate the forecast results, generate baseline forecast with seasonality trends.
• Drive and Challenge building blocks & activities in the Activity review and Pre-Demand meetings.
• Key role in cross-functional activities to reconcile significant variances in demand and to refine demand to reflect all updated sales and marketing assumptions and any capacity or supply constraints from various supply points.
• Interact with sales and marketing team to understand the drivers affecting monthly demand forecast.
• Utilize a collaborative and consensus approach by working with sales and marketing teams to obtain and ensure the latest and accurate information has gone into the monthly forecasts.
• Develop and maintain a Demand Planning Tool/Model for capturing secondary forecast, distributor inventory, orders at port, orders at sea and orders in pipeline to conclude in primary sales forecast at customer and SKU level.
• Collaborate with customer service team on visibility of distributor inventory to ensure the agreed safety stock norms are maintained; manage distributor inventory levels in case of any capacity/supply constraints, product phase-in or phase-outs, etc.
• Monitor volume performance against primary and secondary forecast and provide analysis on variances.
• Provide challenge to sales team on their base, promotional and NPD assumptions to ensure delivery of secondary forecast.
• Implement and achieve forecast accuracy targets & inventory targets.
• Review current Primary and secondary forecast and suggest amendments to future forecast/mechanics.
• Influence and support sales team to improve their forecast accuracy by detailed accuracy and bias Loss analysis and RCA (root cause analysis) to understand the drivers and place corrective actions and mitigations to improve the forecast accuracy and bias KPIs.