Planning Manager - Job #1135

PLANNING MANAGER- JOB #1135

Reports To:
Director of Value Stream
Location:
Menominee, Michigan
Status:
Full-time, On-site, Salary, Exempt
Pay Range: $105,000 annually

The Planning Manager is responsible for managing the company's production planning and control processes and translating business demand into informed and executable production, material, inventory, and capacity plans.

The Planning Manager provides the operational link between demand requirements and manufacturing execution by maintaining planning discipline within the MRP system, evaluating material and capacity requirements, coordinating production priorities, and identifying constraints that could affect the company's ability to execute its operating plan. This position works closely with Production, Purchasing, Engineering, Aftermarket/Sales, Quality, and Finance to ensure that planning assumptions, priorities, material requirements, and production schedules remain aligned.

The Planning Manager is expected to identify emerging problems before they affect production, use data to develop recommended actions, and provide management with accurate and timely information for operational decision-making.

The Planning Manager is expected to advance the Planning function from primarily transactional scheduling, expediting, and near-term issue resolution toward proactive, data-driven planning and operational decision support. The position is responsible for establishing visibility of future demand, material requirements, inventory needs, manufacturing workload, and capacity constraints sufficiently in advance to allow the organization to take effective corrective action. The Planning Manager is expected to establish planning discipline in which production priorities and resource decisions are driven by an integrated operating plan rather than isolated departmental priorities or recurring reactive intervention.

Success in this position is measured not only by the ability to resolve current planning problems, but increasingly by the ability to anticipate and prevent them.

• Develop, maintain, and coordinate the company's time-phased production plans and schedules based on approved demand, customer requirements, backlog, inventory requirements, and production priorities.
• Translate approved demand into actionable production requirements within the MRP system.
• Coordinate production priorities across manufacturing departments and ensure released work supports the approved operating plan.
• Evaluate schedule feasibility based on material availability, labor requirements, production capacity, and known constraints.
• Identify potential schedule conflicts and recommend corrective actions before they affect customer or production requirements.
• Monitor planned versus actual production performance and investigate significant deviations.
• Maintain planning visibility across appropriate short-, intermediate-, and long-range planning horizons, ensuring near-term execution decisions remain aligned with future production, material, inventory, and capacity requirements.
• Maintain the approved production plan as the operational plan of record and ensure changes to priorities, schedules, or requirements are appropriately evaluated, communicated, and incorporated.

• Maintain effective planning practices within the company's MRP system.
• Review MRP recommendations, planned orders, work orders, forecasts, pegged demand, inventory requirements, and exception conditions.
• Ensure planning parameters and assumptions are appropriately maintained and periodically reviewed.
• Identify data or process conditions that create inaccurate, unnecessary, or conflicting MRP signals.
• Coordinate correction of planning-data issues with the appropriate functional owners.
• Establish consistent planning practices for interpreting and acting upon MRP outputs.
• Establish controls for the periodic review of planning-critical master data, including lead times, order policies, safety stock, lot-sizing parameters, planning horizons, forecasts, routings, and other parameters affecting MRP outputs.
• Reconcile MRP-generated requirements with actual material, production, capacity, and configuration conditions and ensure significant discrepancies are identified, understood, and resolved.

• Translate production requirements into time-phased material requirements.
• Work closely with Purchasing to identify material shortages, supplier constraints, and required procurement actions.
• Evaluate material availability against production priorities and identify requirements that place the operating plan at risk.
• Establish and manage shortage prioritization and escalation based on production impact, customer requirements, and the approved operating plan.
• Ensure production schedules reflect realistic material availability rather than theoretical demand alone.
• Provide Purchasing and Production with forward-looking…