Demand Planner

**The Company**

Asahi is more than a beer. Our name connects a diverse portfolio of super premium beers, bringing together Asahi Super Dry with Peroni Nastro Azzurro, our Belgian abbey beer St Stefanus, Pilsner Urquell and Kozel as well as Polish brands Lech and Tyskie. Our vision is to be the leading premium beer business in the UK, through a brand mix that creates a compelling proposition not only for our consumers, but also for you: a senior professional with the ideas, appetite and expertise to change the way people think about beer.

In October 2016 Miller Brands UK became Asahi UK Ltd, a subsidiary of Asahi Europe Ltd. From that moment, we embraced the Asahi ethos of bringing the best quality beer brands to life. It calls for a combination of exceptional products and truly outstanding people. A blend of talent, with a thirst for achievement, success and continuous improvement. Asahi Holdings is the 10th largest beer company by volume in the world and Asahi UK (AUK) is fast establishing a reputation as an exciting, engaging and challenging place to work. Our vision is ambitious, but the structure, plans and commitment are in place to achieve it.

**Our Culture**

At Asahi UK, we embrace the very ethos of bringing the best quality of beer to life, through our premium brands and unique people. We pride ourselves on our ‘challenger mindset’ and entrepreneurial spirit. By owning what we do and approaching our roles in a strongly self-invested manner, we unleash potential from within. We’re resourceful, innovative, united behind common business goals, well-defined processes and a robust strategy.

Having diverse brands as well as passionate and diverse people ensures we cherish and value differences and uniqueness. We are agile in our thinking, collaborative and creative in our approach, transparent in everything we do. Our people own their actions and have opportunities to lead change. For us, the drive for results and the thirst for success are synonymous with creating direct value for our consumers, our customers, our stakeholders and the communities in which we operate.

**Key Purpose Statement**:
The Demand Planner is responsible for the creation of a robust demand signal for100+ skus and 200 customers across the UK and Ireland, delivered through strong technical statistical analysis and collaborative working with customers and commercials team. These plans are produced weekly and monthly for the longer term 18-month plan. These plans are shared with the supply planning team to ensure inventory availability to deliver the expected levels of customer service.

**Key Accountabilities**

The Demand Planner is responsible for the following key outputs and accountabilities

**_Sales and Operations Planning_**
- Support the Head of Demand and SC Service with the co-ordinating the overall sales and operations planning process.
- Supply Chain representative at Channel Sales meetings. Responsible for fielding all supply chain issues in this forum particularly sales forecast accuracy, any service problems and new pack/product introduction
- Support Customer Services and Inventory team with identifying and resolving aged stock issues

**_Long Term Demand Planning_**
- Annually, provide support in delivering a 3 Year demand forecast considering business and industry trends as part of the Integrated Market Planning (i.e. strategic planning) process.
- Provide support and detailed analysis for Budget and Profit Forecast reviews enabling the AUK finance and management team to reach consensus on annual sales volumes for financial planning.

**_Short and Medium-Range Demand Planning_**
- Responsible for delivering a robust weekly and 18 month rolling demand forecast for each SKU at depot level ensuring timely provision to the supply planning team to complete supply planning activities.
- Responsible for obtaining volume consensus, from initial sales forecast meeting to management review meetings and managing volume related risks and opportunities.
- Own the AUK statistical forecast, continuously improving accuracy and driving business relevance.
- Work closely with the sales team who provide specific customer insight and promotional plan to develop an aligned “commercial” demand forecast.
- Responsible for demand planning tools to support the planning process.
- Improve forecasting capability within the sales team by providing ‘best practice’ in forecasting training and continuous feedback.
- Engage with key external customers to improve forecasting information and to ensure promotional volumes and timings are realistic and fully reflected.
- In collaboration with the Supply Planning team monitor in transit stock, stock receipts, order policy and safety stock policy.

**_Reporting_**
- Provide analysis and insight to business on volume trends; considering Customer, Marketing, Special effects, Market & Competitors and understanding demand volatility
- Capture and proactively monitor Economical and weather