Business Process Partner – Planning, Supply Chain & Operations

The Barbour story began in 1894 in South Shields in the North East of England. Founder John Barbour began supplying oilskins and other garments to protect the growing community of sailors, fishermen and dockers. Still family owned and now fifth generation, Barbour HQ remains in South Shields. Under the leadership of Chairman Dame Margaret Barbour, Barbour has grown into a lifestyle brand sold in over 55 countries worldwide including Europe, the US and Asia offering a wardrobe of stylish functional clothing, footwear and accessories inspired by the unique values of the British countryside.

The iconic Barbour Bedale and Barbour Beaufort wax jackets continue to be made by hand in the factory in South Shields. In 2020, Barbour launched Wax for Life, an overarching name for all of Barbour’s wax services designed to encourage customers to extend the life of their wax garments. Wax for Life includes re-waxing and repairs (first introduced in 1921) and Barbour Re-Loved an upcycling circularity initiative.

Each year over 70,000 wax garments are sent back to Barbour globally to be repaired, rewaxed or altered.

J. Barbour & Sons Ltd has an opportunity for a business-facing Business Process Partner to lead the design, governance and continuous improvement of end-to-end Planning, Supply Chain and Operations processes. The role will bring together Planning, Supply Chain, Sourcing, Procurement, Logistics, Distribution, Finance, Commercial and Technology stakeholders to improve visibility, decision-making, process ownership and operational performance. The Business Process Partner will shape improvement opportunities, define scalable ways of working and ensure process and technology change delivers measurable business value.

* The role is based at head office in South Shields and the expectation is 4 days in the office and 1 day of home-working.

• Business Partnership & Opportunity Shaping: Build trusted relationships with Departmental Heads and operational leaders to understand growth priorities, service expectations, planning challenges and operational constraints. Translate business challenges into clearly defined process opportunities with accountable ownership, outcomes, scope, dependencies, risks and measures. Facilitate decisions and resolve cross-functional ownership, information-flow and handover issues.
• End-to-End Process Leadership: Lead discovery, mapping and analysis across forecasting to buy, demand and supply planning, inventory, capacity, raw materials, purchase-order management, order fulfilment and operational performance management. Define practical future-state processes, roles, decision rights, controls, handovers and performance measures. Maintain clear, accessible process documentation and support Business and Process Owners to govern performance. Develop and maintain process improvement roadmaps aligned to business priorities.
• Change & Delivery: Build evidence-based recommendations and support business cases for process, data, organisation or technology improvements. Work with Project Managers to translate approved priorities into clear scope, milestones, sponsorship, resources, adoption and benefits plans. Coordinate business input into requirements, design, testing, training, communications, readiness and post-implementation review.
• Performance & Continuous Improvement: Define and monitor measures covering forecast accuracy, availability, inventory, cycle time, service, cost, adherence, exceptions and adoption. Use data, process evidence and stakeholder insight to identify root causes and prioritise improvements. Embed a practical continuous-improvement rhythm with accountable actions and benefits tracking.

• Relevant experience in planning, supply chain, operations, procurement, logistics, or business process improvement.
• Experience in retail, wholesale, apparel, consumer products or a comparable multi-channel organisation is desirable.
• Experience of ERP, planning, supply-chain or analytics platforms is desirable.
• Strong end-to-end process analysis, facilitation and future-state design capability.
• Excellent communication and influencing skills across different levels of stakeholders.
• Good commercial and operational understanding, with the ability to balance service, inventory, cost, capacity and risk.
• Analytical problem-solving, root-cause analysis and…