Senior Manager, Demand Planning

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As the world leader in dairy, Lactalis is a family‑owned company with over 85,000 pragmatic and ambitious professionals across the globe. Each day, we’re proud to produce award‑winning dairy products that bring people together.

In the US, we proudly offer an unrivaled house of beloved brands, including Galbani Italian cheeses and ricotta, President specialty cheeses and butters, Kraft natural and grated cheeses, Break stone's cottage cheese, Cracker Barrel, Black Diamond cheddar, and Parmalat milk. Our yogurt portfolio includes siggi's, Stonyfield Organic, Brown Cow, Oui, Yoplait, Go‑Gurt, :ratio, Green Mountain Creamery, and Mountain High, along with a growing family of ethnic favorites like Karoun, Gopi, and Arz.

At Lactalis, we live by our core values—Ambition, Engagement, and Simplicity. We foster a workplace where innovation thrives, diverse perspectives are celebrated, and everyone’s unique background and ideas are valued.

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The Senior Manager of Demand Planning is accountable for leading the demand planning team and coordinating the overall demand management process. The principal objective is to ensure a robust and disciplined monthly demand review cycle to deliver an accurate unbiased, unconstrained demand plan based on all relevant cross‑functional input, which will require strong collaboration with commercial and operational partners. This role is responsible for and leading and developing the Demand Planning organization, building world‑class people capabilities and appropriately recruiting the best team to meet the functional and organizational objectives.

• Lead a forecasting team responsible for the development of an unbiased and unconstrained forecast over a 24‑month horizon with properly documented assumptions, including presenting the forecast and associated assumptions during the broader business S&OP process.
• Ensure workload is balanced and team members have appropriate brand / segment responsibility.
• Coach and develop team capabilities in analysis, forecasting, planning, and influencing.
• Optimize ways of working and supporting tools/processes within the team, and with the broader business, to ensure that the efforts of the team keep up with the changing needs of the business.
• Partner with finance to support appropriate linkage between the monthly demand plan and financial forecasts (key assumptions, risks, opportunities).
• Partner with Commercial leadership to quantify & validate risks and opportunities, and support the development of plans to close gaps between the forecast and target.
• Partner with marketing to validate the size of innovations, renovations, and campaigns as they enter into the 24‑month forecast horizon.
• Communicate and influence the business to close gaps between the unbiased forecast and target.
• Present the forecast and associated assumptions to business leadership and key stakeholders.
• Remain an unbiased voice in the face of business pressures.
• Resolve disagreements over planning assumptions and drive for consensus.
• Partner with Supply Planning to ensure that there is confidence in the demand plan, and that key forecast decisions are being made with the appropriate amount of lead time to ensure successful execution and delivery of the plan.
• Drive continuous capability building within the Demand Planning team as a talent development program to promote individual professional and functional growth and development.
• Set and track performance targets for the team across key KPIs including Forecast Error, Bias, and Forecast Value Add.

• Bachelor’s degree in supply chain,…