Demand Planner

About the job
At Danone we operate Smart Working, this means that our Danoners are entrusted to balance the needs of their role, business, and stakeholder needs with their own personal choices on where and how they best do their work. We value output and personal contribution, enabling ‘Danoners’ to be their most energised, healthy, and productive selves.

When team connection and collaboration is required, our hubs are located in Chiswick, Trowbridge and Dublin.

**Role Purpose**
- It is the responsibility of the Demand Planner to lead the overall forecasting process for a given number of customers or channels in the short, mid and long term horizon.
Working collaboratively with the commercial teams, the Demand Planner is responsible for delivering a high quality volume forecast feeding the monthly GPS process and to continuously improve performance of key metrics such as forecast accuracy, bias, service levels and write-offs.

**Role Focus**
- Baseline forecast generation; run analyses on historical data and "clean" events, collect & agree baseline assumptions with input from commercial teams, run and evaluate statistical forecasting models
- Responsible for enriching base forecasts with 'special events' (eg; promotions, marketing activity, etc..) based on inputs from marketing, sales, customer collaboration and customers

SPOC for commercial teams for volume demand generation
- Drive consistent volume assumption tracking across all NPI's from business case to launch
- Ensure strong collaboration with the IPRO and Supply Planning teams to plan first productions, providing relevant forecasting scenarios based on customer launch plans.
- Lead monthly Customer Review meeting with Sales
- Compile daily/weekly short term forecasts incorporating customer knowledge; promotional buy-in and exits, promotion performance vs forecast, range review and innovation activity
- Anticipate forecast change impacts on supply (short/medium term) and proactively communicate forecast changes to Supply Planning and Logistics
- Support the Senior Demand Planner and/or Demand Manager with inputs for cross functional team meetings.
- Contribute to improvements to ways of working within Demand Planning and wider Supply Chain team.
- Demand KPIs reporting and animation

Scope & Impact:

- Responsible for forecast generation by retailer (top customers) or channel, considering wider category trends and business context.
- Responsible for SKU portfolio within the given customer/channel allocation
- Responsible for forecast accuracy and bias of given customers, channels or categories (in turn impacting service levels, DOH and write off's).
- Support scenario planning and decisions for NPD launches

About you

**As a successful Demand Planner we would love to see you demonstrate**:

- Strong data analytics skills, able to produce, interpret and draw conclusions from data
- Excellent interpersonal, communication, and influencing skills, and Senior stakeholder management experience
- Demand planning functional experience 1-2y
- Understanding of S&OP (IBP) processes
- Strong agility, taking responsibility/making decisions in uncertain environments
- Experience of FMCG supply chain (preferably demand/supply)
- SAP/APO or IBP experience advantageous

About us

Danone are a world leader across 3 categories: Essential Dairy & Plant Based, Natural Sourced Waters and Specialised Nutrition, many of our consumer brands are household names, ranging from heritage brands like Cow & Gate and Harrogate Waters to international favourites like Actimel, Alpro and evian. In the UK & Ireland and in every market in which we operate, we are committed to delivering health through food and drink to as many people as possible.

We operate at 5 production sites as well as our 3 HUBS in Chiswick, Trowbridge and Dublin - led by our people who power everything we do and are key to our success. We are a team of 2000+ Danoners, part of a 100,000 strong global family.

‘A force for good’, we are the first top 10 branded food and healthcare manufacturer in the UK & Ireland to certify as a B Corp. We are part of a growing global community set up to balance purpose and profit, helping to create a better world while thriving as businesses.

Our mission and values guide how we behave, our flexible ways of working, how we connect with our communities and how we grow & develop our people. We offer a competitive package including a double matched pension, annual bonus, private healthcare, life assurance, flexible benefits and product vouchers.