Production Planner

Company description:
Refresco Drinks

Job description:
**About You**

Are you experienced in production planning or scheduling, including factoring in production constraints and optimising plans? Have you had significant exposure to an FMCG environment and a good knowledge of SAP demand and supply planning processes and systems?

**About the Role**

We have a fantastic opportunity for a Production Planner to join our Supply Chain team here at Refresco in Kegworth. Reporting to the Planning Manager, you will drive product availability and customer service at lowest cost, by managing a medium to longterm capacity plan.

You will ensure the plan maximises utilisation of the factory whilst minimising network costs, meeting customer service targets and maintaining agreed stock levels. You will then translate the demand plan into business capacity plans with a defined outlookperiod, carrying out effective and economic capacity checking, stock builds and risk mitigation, issuing new plans to the scheduling team, on time, to meet labour and other resource requirements.

You will also ensure that system processes e.g. SAP, Preactor, etc. are clearly followed to maintain data integrity, including completion of checklists, compilation of business measures to monitor process improvement and all aspects of good housekeeping, whilsttaking advantage of opportunities for changing demand with customer teams effectively and swiftly to enable them to realise their customer service.

**The duties in this role include but are not limited to**:

- Being accountable for producing and maintaining the 52-week, rough cut capacity plan to utilise the factories’ capacity in the most cost effective way
- Being responsible for planning stock builds around downtime and speculative volume to avoid shortages and capacity constraints
- Carrying out effective and economic short term capacity checking, issuing new plans to availability / site scheduling to meet labour and other resource requirements
- Translating the forecasts into business capacity plans with a defined outlook period, smoothing any peaks or drops in capacity to reduce labour costs whilst maintaining service to ensure lowest cost for the business
- Managing opportunities for changing demand with customer teams effectively and swiftly to enable customer teams to realise their customer service agreements
- Managing the introduction of new products & changes to existing sku’s in the planning process to meet launch deadlines in a cost effective and productive manner
- Maintaining and upgrading planning tools as required to meet the ever-changing business needs
- Upgrading systems and processes used so that planning becomes more automated and less time-consuming
- Adhereing to all inventory policies, batch sizes and production cycles issued by the Master Scheduler, challenging where appropriate to actively reduce finished goods working capital
- Taking responsibility for generating, maintaining and explaining what-if scenario planning to include optimal shift patterns for the factory and machinery requirements to reduce direct labour costs
- Monitoring & reporting compliance to production plans via weekly PVA and KPI’s
- Monitoring FG stocks and being responsible for highlighting key offenders
- Driving actions through commercial to sell through obsolete stock
- Investigating all availability shortages, due to lack of stock and implementing corrective actions
- Planning in the introduction of new products & changes to existing SKU’s in the planning process to meet launch deadlines in a cost effective and productive manner

**Salary & Benefits**

The salary for this role is competitive and dependent on experience. We also offer an annual bonus incentive and a good company pension scheme, 2x basic salary life assurance, plus 25 days holiday in addition to bank holidays (with the option to purchaseadditional holidays) and free onsite parking. Working hours are Monday - Thursday 8.30 - 5.00, Fridays 8.30 - 4.00 with the option of working up to two days per week from home, with the option of working up to two days per week remotely and free, onsite parking.We also offer our employees access to GroceryAid - a support service offering financial, legal, wellbeing and practical support, advice and counselling to people working in the grocery industry as well as Perkbox - a benefits platform offering discounts, freeperks and wellbeing tools for all employees.

**Who we are**

Our drinks on every table. That's the Refresco vision. We're passionate about producing tasty, refreshing drinks and we’re thirsty for more and growing fast. We’re a global business and invested £1.25 billion in expanding our manufacturing footprint to makeus the largest independent bottler of soft drinks and fruit juices in the world. We currently produce 12 billion litres from 64 manufacturing plants in 12 countries and we’re only just getting started

Our UK Business has six manufacturing plants providing a great place to work for 1500 employees producing private label soft drinks and fruit juices for all the leading retailers including Tesco, ASDA, Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s, ALDI and Lidl. We also manufacturefor branded customers such as Innocent, Ocean Spray, Weetabix, Del Monte and Um Bongo. Whether it’s packed in cartons, bottles or cans, we ensure that our products are made to the highest quality standards but they get where they need to be when they needto get there to meet the needs of our high profile customers.