Demand Planner

No Relocation Assistance Offered
Job Number #165016 - Hout Bay, Western Cape, South Africa

**Who We Are**

Colgate-Palmolive Company is a global consumer products company operating in over 200 countries specialising in Oral Care, Personal Care, Home Care, Skin Care, and Pet Nutrition. Our products are trusted in more households than any other brand in the world, making us a household name

Join Colgate-Palmolive, a caring, innovative growth company reimagining a healthier future for people, their pets, and our planet. Guided by our core values—Caring, Inclusive, and Courageous—we foster a culture that inspires our people to achieve common goals. Together, let's build a brighter, healthier future for all.

**Job Summary**
The Demand Planner has overall accountability for the RSA Demand Planning strategy and performance. Implement strategy, systems design & implementation, and processes to develop and strengthen demand planning practices and performance in RSA. Ensure alignment between the commercial teams and the CBS shared services to ensure customer service, inventory and simplification objectives are achieved.

**Key Responsibilities**

**1. Demand Planning**
- Ensure full alignment between commercial processes and CBS shared services execution.
- Prepare & participate in the Monthly discipline process to develop an aligned demand plan for sub-categories of responsibility. Gaps & opportunities are identified, quantified & addressed. Business performance for the most recent month, quarter, YTD vs. plan is reviewed.
- Gather customer plans (baseline, promotions & new products) & other key information from multi-functional team (CDT's, customer development from Hub or country, consumer marketing). Determine deviations vs. statistical demand plan, gain alignment, & document key assumptions
- Ensure alignment of final demand plan to supply plan (current & new products). Evaluate changes to demand, inventory, and customer backlogs. Identify resource constraints, potential solutions, and impact on demand plans.
- Supervise inbound orders and shipments on a regular basis. Understand sources of significant changes & flag to commercial and supply chain partners. Facilitate resolution of demand requirements outside of agreed to tolerances via “Fast Track Process”
- Measure, report, and drive improvement of demand planning accuracy for the total subsidiary, and category level categorized by new products, regular items, & promotional items.
- Sources of Demand Planning BIAS are identified, addressed, and eliminated.
- Coordinate, analyze and identify supply risks of the different supply sources, to realign and communicate the plans to the commercial team.
- Work cross functionally through the New SKU Process to finalize pipeline volume for new products. Track/measure actual shipments & conduct post launch analysis. Collaborate with a cross functional team to manage & communicate SKU life cycle changes.
- Collaborate within CS&L as well as other key parts of the organization, closely collaborating with each function and ensuring the outcomes are driven in the demand planning area.
- Uploading Demand Plan into demand planning tool on a monthly basis and ensuring volumes filter through the system, enabling replenishment.

**2. Inventory Management**
- Drive SKU simplification processes and results
- Improve Case Fill, by ensuring reasons for over selling SKU’s are understood and built into future demand plans
- Manage SLOB by ensuring accurate diagnostics are done on top under selling SKU’s compared to DP, inbound lead times are respected, and guiding the team on the corrective actions to be taken
- Responsible for ensuring that all new products and SKU transitions are communicated within the business, supported by an updated and transparent demand plan.
- Ensuring all Master Data is up to date

**3. Adhoc**
- Managing import permits process
- Managing import documentation process
- Managing the new product registrations process
- Run the donations process
- Perform other duties as assigned

**This is not an exhaustive list of duties or functions.**

**Education/ Experience Requirements**:

- **
Basic Education**:Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in Supply Chain, Finance, Engineering, Business Administration. Finance background advantageous
- ** Experience**: Minimum 3 years experience in Inventory Management, Supply Network Planning and Demand Planning

**Encouraged Areas of Skills**
- High level of intermediate to advanced Excel skills
- SAP experience advantageous
- Kinaxis-Maestro experience advantageous
- Demonstrates data management and analytical capabilities as the role involves management of significant amounts of data
- Driving innovation, by challenging the status quo & collaboratively finding opportunities to continuously improve our processes, tools & systems.
- Understanding of Business processes, systems & strategies
- Excellent communication skills (both written and spoken), in the English language
- Sche