• Build, validate, and publish the monthly demand forecast in Anaplan for an assigned portfolio of customers and SKUs, including baseline, promotional lift, new item ramp, and phase-out, and stand behind the assumptions you set.
• Review the statistical baseline in Anaplan each cycle, apply overrides at the appropriate level with documented reasoning, and maintain override discipline rather than defaulting to manual entry.
• Build and compare scenario versions in Anaplan for risk and opportunity, promotional plans, supply constraints, and pricing changes, so the business sees the range before it commits to a number.
• Hold forecast accuracy and bias to target for your portfolio, review results every cycle, and come to the review with root cause on misses and a corrective action, not only the variance.
• Build launch forecasts for new items using historical analogs, planned marketing support, and account level merchandising plans, then track performance against the ramp and adjust.
• Represent your portfolio in consensus and S&OP, presenting forecast changes, the drivers behind them, and the risk and opportunity attached, to Sales, Revenue Growth Management, and Finance.
• Collect and challenge assumptions covering promotional activity, launches and discontinuations, distribution changes, pricing, and customer specific plans, and reflect them in the plan with a documented rationale.
• Quantify and communicate risk and opportunity early enough for the business to make a decision rather than react to a result.
• Partner with Supply Planning on inventory position, weeks of supply, fill rate risk, and allocation decisions, and flag supply and demand imbalance before it reaches the customer.
• Become the company expert on retailer and channel trends for your accounts using internal, POS, and syndicated data, and communicate what customer order behavior is telling us.
• Support the annual operating plan and long range planning cycles with portfolio level demand inputs and scenario analysis in partnership with Finance and Commercial.
• Participate in the Anaplan implementation for your portfolio, including user acceptance testing, data validation against source systems, and migration of your accounts off Excel.
• Partner with the Demand Planning Analyst on master data accuracy, reporting needs, and analysis, and escalate data breaks that affect the forecast.
• Adhere to the demand review calendar and forecast lock dates, and keep your portfolio current between cycles as conditions change.
• Identify where the cycle is slow, manual, or unreliable, and help fix it.