Supply Chain - Senior Planner

Posted Wednesday 28 January 2026 at 01:00

Location:

Lightbody, Bothwell Road, Hamilton, ML3 0DW

Shift: Monday - Friday

We are now recruiting for a Senior Planner to join our team at our Lightbody site in Hamilton . This is a brand new role and will give the successful candidate an opportunity to lead a small team as well as forming strong cross functional relationships in a busy manufacturing environment.

135 years of craft baking skills lie behind the quality of the special branded cakes, sweet snacks and slices we produce in Hamilton and 55 million products are produced each year. Lightbody’s is the UK’s largest supplier of celebration cakes to UK retailers, with Disney, Mars, Universal and Thorntons all within the portfolio of branded cakes made under licence. We also make a variety of supermarkets ’ well-loved own-label cakes and in-store bakery bites.

To be successful in this role y ou will be a confident decision-maker who thrives in a fast-paced, high-volume manufacturing environment and is comfortable balancing competing priorities. You bring credibility through experience, use data to guide judgement, and are trusted to make trade-off decisions that protect service, efficiency, and cost. You lead with clarity and resilience, staying calm under pressure while providing direction to both your scheduling team and senior stakeholders.

Above all, you take ownership — of the plan, the priorities, and the outcomes.

The Senior Planner is responsible for ensuring manufacturing operations run efficiently, predictably, and safely by developing and maintaining robust short, medium, and long-term production plans. Operating within a high-volume food production environment, the role aligns people, materials, and equipment to meet customer demand, service targets, and cost objectives. As the final authority on production priorities and schedule changes, you will play a critical role in enabling operational excellence, supporting food safety and compliance, and ensuring consistent delivery in a dynamic setting.

You will own the end-to-end production scheduling process, translating demand forecasts into realistic, achievable plans that reflect capacity, labour, materials, and equipment constraints. Working closely with Operations, Materials, Engineering, Quality, and Supply Chain teams, you will optimise throughput, minimise downtime, and respond quickly to unplanned events such as breakdowns, labour shortages, or demand volatility.

You will authorise and adjust schedules as required , ensuring ERP/MRP systems and visual planning tools always reflect the latest agreed plan. Alongside this, you will lead and develop a small team of schedulers, setting clear objectives , conducting regular 1:1s and PDRs, mentoring capability, and embedding best-practice planning standards. You will also support governance requirements, including P74 sign-off, and ensure new product launches are fully planned, reviewed, and production-ready.

As a model of FFG’s core values and behaviours, you will actively champion a culture of continuous improvement and encourage others to do the same. You will also support your team in working towards clearly set objectives and KPI’s.

• Proven experience in production planning, scheduling, or factory operations, ideally within a manufacturing or FMCG environment
• Strong working knowledge of ERP/MRP systems and production scheduling tools
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills with the ability to analyse and interpret production data
• Demonstrated experience making judgement-based planning decisions and confidently adjusting plans when required
• Strong understanding of manufacturing flows, constraints