Solmax develops solutions and systems infrastructures in environmental market applications transportation, building sites, water management, natural resources, agriculture, horticulture, and other industrial applications. The company's value is delivered to the market through its knowledge of synthetic extruded liner, woven, nonwoven, knitted, and netting products in customer applications. Solmax is organized regionally with management teams and production locations in the Americas, Europe/Middle East and Asia.
The Solmax Americas business services the North and South American markets through manufacturing locations in Quebec, Georgia, Texas, South Dakota, and South Carolina
Position Overview:
In 2021, Solmax acquired and began integrating two entities of similar size, TenCate Geosynthetics and Propex Global. Solmax Americas desires to create a common S&OP process and organization for the new combined entity. For businesses which have implemented Demand Planning, this position will have direct responsibility for running the relevant processes amongst all divisions. The position will also play a key role in projects to implement Demand Planning throughout the region. The Demand Planner drives the sales forecasting process for the Solmax business by working cross functionally with Sales, finance, and current CRM opportunities, analyzing market trends, historic data, commercial market data. The Demand planner is a trusted leader responsible for providing demand planning support to all areas of the business, collaborating with key stakeholders with on-going support of the DSX Planning system & training.
Essential Job Functions
Own and conduct monthly consensus forecast reviews with the Regional Sales Teams and Directors to validate and adjust current fiscal year forecasts gaining full alignment with business owners and executive management.
Analyze the sales forecast model from DSX at product and business key levels to arrive at aligned consensus forecast at an aggregate level.
Integrate available business intelligence collected from sales, marketing, operations, and finance to generate, 90 days and 6-12-month demand forecasts.
Work directly with sales organization to make and improve forecast adjustments.
Provide analytics of the sales forecast will help to drive decisions of the business in regard to production and inventory planning.
Ability to create and build large excel reports to support forecasting tools and daily reporting.
Monitor and report on KPIs which in include forecast accuracy, forecast error, bias and MAPE.
Report and create monthly Demand Planning Presentations to support S&OP meetings.
Work with internal stakeholders to develop and enhance reporting and analysis tools.
Understand sales trends, research demand drivers, prepare forecast data, develop statistical forecast models, and evaluate forecast results.
Tracking daily and MTD sales vs. forecast and budget to facilitate actions for hitting business objectives.
Align S&OP demand planning best practices with all Solmax divisions to create alignment amongst the Americas.
Use Continuous Improvement methodologies to find ways for better forecasting and more accurate business planning.
Utilize demand planning automation (DSx) to calculate statistical demand and enable adjustments from salespeople.
Maintain and improve Demand Planning analytics and visualization tools in Tableau.
Work with planning automation tools (DSx) to improve statistical forecasts.
Work directly with Product Management Team to adhere to Master Item Maintenance for item classifications within DSx-new items, supersessions.
Maintain SOP documentation related to demand planning.
Other Job Functions:
Support financial forecasting and budgeting.
Key user for planning automation tools (DSx)
Backup Director of S&OP as needed.
Ongoing maintenance, testing, and optimization of existing ERP systems.
Review, understand, and observe safety and security rules and regulations.
Basic Qualifications
Minimum of 5 years' experience in Demand Planning required.
Strong verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to provide appropriate liaison activities with all levels of the organization and outside the organization.
Experience with change management and organizational transformation preferred.
Strong analytical, organizational, decision making, and presentation skills.
Experience building and managing an end-to-end demand planning process.
Strong influencer with good written and oral communication skills, including online meeting management, in-person plant training and PowerPoint.
Bachelor's degree in supply chain management, Economics, Finance, or Engineering preferred.
APICS or Professional supply chain certification preferred.
Formal training in statistical analysis preferred.
Experience with advanced planning tools such as Demand Solutions, OMPartners, APO, etc. is preferred.
Must be an advanced level user with MS Excel and good proficiency with other Microsoft business tools (Outlook, Teams, Explorer, SharePoint, etc)
Experience with data visualization tools such as PowerBI or Tableau preferred.
ERP MRP system experience preferred (SAP, MS Dynamics, Infinium/AS400)