Job Summary

The demand planner has the responsibility for the full-term volume demand forecast per cluster for the Benelux. In this role, the Volume Forecast Data Analyst will contribute to the standard business process (S&OP), in close cooperation with the Value Forecast Analyst, Supply chain Specialists and Sales. 

This contains the responsibility for the total volume forecast over 2 major categories for a rolling horizon of 18 months. The main focus is on the horizon of 2 - 6 months providing the business with a robust rolling volume forecast using category market intelligence to translate the plans of sales/marketing and market dynamics into a volume forecast. This volume forecast is input for client's Supply Chain network to make production plans in the factories. 

The Volume Forecast Data Analyst is the driver of the demand volume forecast in the S&OP process (Business Forecast Process).

In this challenging position, there is an exciting balance between strategic planning, analysis, actions plans resulting from this, and stakeholder and business management. Strong relations are essential in this role!   

Demand Planning:

• Responsible for both base and promotional planning (0-18 months);
• Responsible for adjustments of the outcome of the promotional predictive model based on data analytics;
• Responsible for KPI’s as Forecast Accuracy, Forecast Bias, exceptions and outliers; 
• Integrate top-down forecast in bottom-up;
• Manage volume exception driven by sales input in overall volume forecast;
• Translate the innovation and relaunches forecast for the full horizon (0-18 months) in client's planning tools;
• Manage Assumptions, Risks and Opportunities & translate to volume impact;
• Actively contribute to the improvement road map – both in execution as well as in proactively propose potential opportunities;
• Analyze datasets and the outcome of our predictive model.

Business partnering:

• Establish and maintain strong relationships with Value Forecast Analyst, Supply chain Specialist, Sales, Trade Category Management, Brand Building, and Business Partners for forecast optimization purposes and perfect execution of product launches;
• Understand the dynamics of the business in order to communicate and distribute the correct information to the business (develop a high degree of business sense); 
• Report to the Category Planning Lead.

Working on improvement Projects

• Help improving the predictive models by doing analysis on our forecast;
• Start a project from scratch with a third parties/stakeholders/ consulting partner that will help the business to automate a certain process and save costs;
• Build your own scripts that support teams, monitor the data quality in the systems or sends an automatic email to recipients that need to perform a task;
• Visualize your projects with a visualization tool (e.g. PowerBI, Google Data Studio) to let the data speak and influence;
• Know how to simplify processes and save time by doing so.