Demand Planning Manager

The successful candidate will ideally have a minimum of 5 years’ experience of demand planning gained in an FMCG organisation. You will be well versed in interpreting data from different sources and translating this into a production plan that ensures customer availability is protected but best value from production assets is achieved. You’ll be a strong communicator, with good influencing skills and a willingness to work cross functionally.

Key responsibilities include:

• Demand & Promo/Activity planning, with the aim to provide a robust, statistically generated base rates at customer level for all SKUs over rolling timescales
• Provide stock management & availability processes to enable customer service levels to be achieved
• Lead S&OP meetings
• Ensure stock issues are identified and resolutions proposed and actioned

Skills & Qualifications include;

• Minimum of 5 years of experience in Demand Planning gained in a Food manufacturing organisation.
• Experience of building and developing a robust planning model
• Strong analytical skills: must feel comfortable working with several sources of data and information to identify relevant insights.
• Data gathering, and quantitative and qualitative data analysis, including business process metrics and measures linking to business KPIs.
• Strong PC skills required
• Strong leadership & communication skills
• Demonstrated success in process and/or tools improvements initiatives.

Surya Foods is one of the largest suppliers of authentic world foods in the UK and the company behind the fastest growing rice brand, Laila - part of the rapidly expanding, family run Flying Trade Group (FTG) which boasts an annual UK turnover in excess of £160-million, operating in over 30 countries. Impressive growth has seen FTG enter the 2018 Sunday Times Top Track 250 league tables and the Sunday Times International Track 200 in 2019 and in 2020 company sales are already growing at 28%.

We supply 100’s of products into supermarket giants Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl, Co-Op, Iceland. We supply key customers such as Bestway, Brakes and Bidfood in our every growing food service channel. We also supply over 1000 independent retail accounts across the UK which is the heartbeat of our business, as well as our recently created online store selling over 2000 SKU’s.

Surya Foods also represents some leading imported brands including Britannia Biscuits, National Foods, FOCO, Ajinomoto and Samai among others as part of our World Foods ranges.

With rapid expansion plans over next 3 years, we are planning on launching another 100 SKU’s this year, bringing new products and innovation to every sales channel. We are dramatically expanding our business with new capacity, new manufacturing capability and a much bigger commercial, marketing and buying team. We are embarking on a journey from specialist World Foods supplier to a leading FMCG mainstream manufacturer that is truly multi-channel and global.