Planner

**Planner**

**Salary**: £25,000 - £28,000 p/a

**Shift**: Sunday-Wednesday / Thursday-Saturday (in rotation)

**Shift Times**: 06.00 - 18.00

**Location**: Bakkavor, Wigan

**Benefits Package**: 33 Days Annual Leave (Inc BH)

Life Assurance

Personal Accident Cover

Pension

Flexible Benefits Package

Staff Shop

Free Parking

At Bakkavor we’re proud to offer you a career with real scope for development. To reward your hard work and ambition as a talented Planner with plenty of support and opportunity and empower you to drive your own success and create a career you can be proud of too.

**Who are Bakkavor**:
Bakkavor is one of the leading providers of fresh prepared food in the UK, with an international presence in the US and China. Our 19,000 employees operate from 39 locations, developing and producing innovative food for a wide variety of occasions and budgets. In the UK, we work with leading grocery retailers, focusing on their own label brands.

In the UK, our customers include some of the UKs best known grocery retailers including Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Asda and Morrison’s, who sell our products to consumers under their respective retail brands. Bakkavor Meals based in Wigan, specialises in making chilled ready meals, food to go salads and vegetable accompaniments and employs over 1,000 people. It is part of the Bakkavor Meals sector which has eight factories in the UK.

**Job Detail**
A fantastic opportunity for a Production Planner to facilitate the smooth running of the factory from receiving customer orders to dispatching finished goods. You will use bespoke IT software to manage the daily work order and a 31 day rolling forecast (Launches/Promotions/De-Lists). You will drive the production plan ensuring Customer service levels are maintained and KPI’s are delivered. Reviewing current practices and continuously look at alternative ways to improve will also be a key part of your remit as well as working closely with counterparts outside of the planning function to deliver improvement projects when required.

**Qualifications**:
It is essential that you meet the following criteria:

- Previous experience in a Planning role, ideally in a manufacturing / FMCG environment
- Computer literate with good understanding of Maths.
- Must be able to work accurately and logically paying attention to detail.
- Flexible approach and awareness of responsibilities.
- A comprehensive understanding of the planning process, enabling the development of continuous performance improvement plans covering projects, efficiency and quality
- Strong communication skills with a confident approach

**What will you do?**
- Establish best practices across teams/ shifts
- Ensure realistic, achievable, accurate information is supplied to operations in a timely way
- Keep planning manual & training matrix updated with all current processes & procedures
- Control WIP & FG stocks to minimise OOD material
- Support the PM in delivery of department & site strategy
- Establish meeting schedule to keep ops & planning up to date with daily current reality. React to situation, elevate as necessary
- Cultivate customers contact at appropriate level to foster good working relationships with customer supply teams
- Report & analyse KPIs, discuss with team & create improvement strategy

**About you**
- Be working for a chilled food manufacturer
- Have excellent computer skills
- Be able to drive change and work under your own initiative.

**What you can expect from us**:
When joining us you can expect a highly competitive rewards package including group pension and other flexible benefits - alongside excellent career progression prospects across the Bakkavor group.

**Proud to be Bakkavor**

We’re proud to be the leading UK provider of innovative, high-quality, fresh prepared food. We’re proud to be driven by the hard work and passion of our people. And we’re proud to offer a wide range of careers full of support and opportunity. Join our team and we’ll make you proud too.