Senior Planner

The Role:
A senior management role within the H&B Global Planning, leading a team of people who are responsible for ensuring that customer-facing stock availability targets are achieved within the constraints of the financial budgets by creating highly collaborative relationships with other commercial departments and vendors, and by instilling a “results driven / insights led” culture within their team.

Operating at a senior level and mirroring the H&B Business Unit structure, this role will collaborate with senior commercial counterparts within the Trading Teams and ensure that their team are focussed on supporting the Business Plan for the relevant Business Unit and demonstrably understand the impact all their activities ultimately have on sales and margin.

A tenacious attitude to achieving results and meeting KPI targets needs a focus on day-to-day operational results which will require good performance management and team development skills, yet this role will also require strong strategic capabilities to ensure the medium and longer-term objectives are also met.

They will need to be highly influential within their peer group, able to create effective relationships with external organisations and embody a “continuous improvement” culture.
- **DC availability (3**rd** Party Goods).**
- Achieve Availability measures by DC and picking channel within DCs.
- Effective balance of stock across DCs.
- Control of DC inbound replenishment parameters down to SKU level.
- **In-Store availability (ISA)**
- Control store replenishment parameters down to SKU level to meet both ISA and stockholding targets.
- Control of Promotional Allocation strategy to ensure store stock levels to support the promotional plan and DC volumes are within tolerances.
- Ensure root causes of availability failures are proactively identified and mitigated.
- Collaborate with Retail Operations to maintain store stockfile accuracy.
- **Stockholding**
- Define and implement strategy to achieve stock-holding budgets.
- Monitor stock levels by supply node to identify outlying stock problems and collaborate with Commercial Teams to mitigate.
- Collaborate with Vendors and Buying Teams to ensure all order parameters (MOQ, Lead Times etc) are set at a level that can maintain availability within the stock budget.
- Collaborate with Commercial Teams to ensure initiatives (Range Reviews, Seasonal Buys etc) are achievable within the stock budget.
- **DC productivity, capacity and service level.**
- Control of picking parameters to maximise DC productivity within the limitations of the ISA and stock budgets.
- Collaborate with DC Management Teams on inbound / outbound stock volumes to minimise volatility within agreed tolerances.
- Collaborate with DC Management Teams on strategies to ensure DC capacity limits are not breached.
- Ensure Service Level outliers are investigated by the DC management Team and resolved.
- **NPD and Range Reviews**
- Ensure NPD, RR and other commercial initiatives are supported with adequate resource to achieve a “right first time” culture.
- Provide reports to support commercial initiatives from a supply chain perspective and ensure critical paths are implemented and followed.
- Sign Off on all NPD supply chain metrics (Lead time, MOQ etc).
- **Forecasting**
- Ensure all products are forecasted in line with promotional critical path.
- Evaluate forecast accuracy and instil a “continuous improvement” culture within the Forecasting Team by sharing best practice and facilitating collaboration across the Forecasting, Commercial and Retail Teams to understand and learn from outlying forecasts.
- Control DC and store replenishment parameters to account for and anticipate non-promotional rates of sale.
- Ensure high levels of collaboration with external vendors on forecasts.
- **Deleted and short-dated stock**
- Collaborate with Commercial Teams to ensure exit stock is managed out of the business in a timely manner in order to achieve the stock budget notwithstanding the margin implications.
- Liaise with Merchandising and Retail Operation Teams to identify and mitigate any non-zoned stock as a result of commercial initiatives.
- Ensure short-dated stock issues are identified and collaborate with commercial teams so that appropriate actions can be taken to minimise margin loss.
- Identify SKUs that continually cause short-dated issues and collaborate with Buying / Commercial Teams to resolve.
- **OTIF and Supplier NPS**
- Monitor supplier OTIF metrics and manage outliers to resolution.
- Ensure regular supplier meetings are in place with a cadence depending on supplier size / impact and that KPIs are reviewed at each with action plans to improve.
- Collaborate with key suppliers to identify best practices and opportunities to improve H&B / supplier relationships.
- Ensure commercial data (sales, forecasts, stock data etc) is share with suppliers to improve overall supplier service level.
- **International and Fra