The Role
The Production Planning Lead will oversee a team of Planners and Buyers who are responsible for translating customer demand into actionable production schedules while ensuring raw material availability to support these production plans. The ideal candidate will possess strong leadership skills and a commitment to continuous improvement in planning processes.
Duties
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of Production Planners and Buyers.
• Set clear objectives, priorities, and KPIs for the team and review performance regularly.
• Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement.• Support recruitment, onboarding, and development of new team members.
• Oversee the translation of customer demand and forecasts into optimised weekly and daily production schedules.
• Ensure Planners have considered key capacity constraints, product priorities, and service commitments.
• Work closely with Production to align quarterly schedules with capabilities and constraints.
• Develop Quarterly plans to align production activities with business objectives, operational constraints, and market demands over a mid-term horizon.
• Ensure Buyers place purchase orders in a timely and efficient manner to secure required raw materials, components, and packaging.
• Monitor supplier performance and material availability risks, escalating and mitigating as needed.
• Own service (Fill Rate, Backorders) and inventory KPIs for the planning area.
• Analyse performance data, identify root causes of service or inventory issues, and implement corrective actions.
• Provide regular reporting on production plans, adherence to plan, service levels, and inventory performance.
• Partner with Production, Quality, Process Engineering, Procurement and Commercial teams to resolve supply issues and align on priorities.
• Contribute to S&OE /IBM & Supply Review processes, providing clear visibility of supply capabilities and constraints.
• Present updates at daily Tier meetings with site leadership to align on priorities and resolve bottlenecks.
• Identify and drive process improvements within production planning and buying (e.g. planning parameters, MRP settings, workflows).
• Ensure data accuracy in planning and ERP systems (e.g. master data, lead times, lot sizes).
• Champion best practices in planning, forecasting, and inventory management, leveraging system capabilities and analytics.
Who You Are
• Honours Degree in Supply Chain Management, Business, or related discipline.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in production planning / supply planning / buying in a manufacturing environment.
• Proven experience leading or supervising a team is strongly preferred.• Experience with ERP / planning systems (e.g. SAP, APO or similar).
• Strong people leadership, coaching, and stakeholder management skills.
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving abilities; comfortable working with data and KPIs.
• Solid understanding of MRP, production planning, and inventory management principles.• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence across functions and levels.
• Continuous improvement mindset; experience with Lean / process improvement is an advantage.
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