Title:  Factory Buyer/Planner

Summary:

Establish and maintain the Manufacturing Production Schedule and implement sourcing plans and tactics for assigned products. The Production Schedule must be feasible and ensure that adequate capacity and material supply exist to meet customer requirements. Ongoing communication with affected functions and stakeholders is expected to facilitate balance supply with demand, meeting customer requirements and fully utilizing manufacturing resources.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Create and maintain the manufacturing production plan and create manufacturing orders per plan
• Optimize production schedules in accordance to customer demand and availability capacity
• Accountable for downstream replenishment and timely release of manufacturing orders
• Identify and address short-term supply constraints within the weeks process (long-term constraints within monthly process); analyze daily supply/demand alerts and address or escalate accordingly
• Interface with QA and warehouse staff regarding rejected/defective materials, making the necessary arrangements with operations or procurement to ensure prompt relaplacement
• Participate in Supply Plan development and in establishing planning time fences for aggregate Supply Plans and for detail Master Plans
• Translate the Production Plan into a schedule for producing or procuring components, materials and services
• Maintain and provide valid lead time data to sales and marketing organization to guard against over-committing company resources and/or parts and materials
• Identify and resolve conflics with supply and demand, and availability of capacity in conjunction with Operations Leadership
• Schedule and process customer shipments
• Inventory transactions – back up for the Material Handler
• Occasional travel is required

Qualifications:

• Demonstrated experience creating and managing feasible and balanced supply plans, in accordance with demand, to support targets consistent with custoemr requirements for short, medium and long-term capacity planning
• Ability to develop and maintain strong relationships and collaboration key stakeholders
• Ability to proactively diagnose and address potential issues in supply shortage or customer service interruption (e.g. resource requirements planning constraints)
• Possess a customer-first mindset to understand customer needs and exceed customer expectations
• Possess a strong understanding and awareness of the principles of extended Supply Chain management and fundamentals of Supply Chain design and strategy
• Data mining reporting skills through MS-Excel; specifically V-lookup and Pivot tables
• Ability to drive continuous process improvement and lead small scale projects
• Experience proactively seeking to leverage exisiting IS capabilities to improve current and future Supply Chain performance (e.g., systems, reports or metrics)
• Ability to apply appropriate process improvement tools, tehcnique and Supply Chain metrics to measure, analyze, diagnose and improve future performance
• Possess a strong attention to detail
• Have a strong understanding of range of production planning and execution systems

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent experience. Degree in Supply Chain Management, Business, Engineering is preferred
• 5 years production/planning/schedule work experience in a manufacturing supply chain
• Strong ERP systems and computer software experience (e.g. SAP, JDE, Excel, etc.)
• Manufacturing Planning experience with custom configuration, high-mix, low-volume manufacturing
• Proficiency in MS Office, Word

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations:

• CPSM, CPM, APICS CPIM certification
• Lean Sigma certification

Language Skills:

• Ability to read and understand English

Mathematical Skills:

• Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Descriptive Statistics

Physical Requirements:

The physical demands described here are representative of those

that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job.  Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions.

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly required to remain in a stationary position, operate a computer, phone, and other office machinery, position self to move, communicate, and exchange information.  The employee must be able to move up to   10  pounds. Specific vision ability required by this job includes close vision, distance vision, color vision, peripheral vision, depth perception, and the ability to adjust focus.

Work Environment:

While performing the duties of this job, the employee is regularly exposed to an office environment in a manufacturing plant.