Manufacturing Capacity Planning Manager

Regional Leader - Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning

This role is responsible for developing and executing medium and long term demand and capacity planning processes across the Americas region which includes covers four manufacturing plants. This role reports directly to the Regional Vice President, Operations and serves as a key liaison between Sales, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Engineering, Plant Operations, and HR.

• Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain/Operations, Manufacturing Engineering, Business Analytics, or related field.
• Minimum 7 years in capacity planning, SIOP, production planning, or operations within capital equipment / low-volume, high-mix environments.
• Strong cross-functional leadership with dotted-line influence; comfortable leading meetings and driving decisions without direct authority.
• Expert-level Excel (Power Query, advanced formulas, scenario modeling) and Power BI (data modeling, DAX, visualization).
• Experience with SAP (PP/MM modules) strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with routings, work centers, takt/cycle time, changeover modeling, and constraint-based planning.
• Systems thinker with strong quantitative skills and business judgment.
• Exceptional communication—able to translate complex analyses into clear recommendations.
• Comfortable in ambiguous, fast-paced environments; bias for action and follow-through.
• Detail-oriented, with robust data hygiene and assumption tracking.
• Collaborative, credible, and respectful with plant teams and corporate leaders alike.

• Leading the regional Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning (SIOP) process and capacity planning activities.
• Translating demand forecasts into medium and long term production plans to ensure operational alignment. Each plant has a production planner that plans the weekly, daily, and shift loads by work center in that specific plant.
• Providing analysis and recommendations that inform the annual budget and long-term strategy.
• Supporting decision-making in a low-volume, high-mix manufacturing environment.

This position requires strong analytical skills, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to manage complex planning challenges in a global capital goods manufacturing business across four manufacturing sites.

• Analyze actual orders and forecasted demand to determine optimal factory allocation across 4 plants (considering lead-time, capability, cost, and capacity).
• Create and maintain a rolling 12–24 month capacity outlook by product family, value stream, and work center.

• Develop forward-looking requirements for:
• Equipment & tooling: specific machine types, takt-time assumptions, changeover/time loss, utilization targets.
• Manufacturing floor space: bays/cells, material flow, buffer/kanban sizing.
• Labor & shifts: headcount by skill, shift structure per work area, overtime and temp strategies.
• Supplier spend & capacity: align external capacity with internal plans; highlight risk, ramp, and long-lead items.
• Lead weekly SIOP cadence: demand review, supply/capacity review, executive alignment; publish gap-to-plan and mitigation actions.
• Facilitate monthly capacity reviews with the Regional Vice President Operations and plant leaders; drive decisions on load leveling, outsourcing, and investment.
• Provide inputs to the annual operating budget (Cap Ex, OpEx, staffing) and annual strategic plan (capacity expansions, footprint, automation).

• Sales: validate demand signals, program launches, customer priorities.
• SCM: confirm supplier capacity, lead times, risk, and cost impacts.
• Manufacturing Engineering: define equipment/process requirements and routings.
• Plant & HR Managers: plan staffing, shifts, training/skill ramp, and hiring timelines.

• Build and maintain Power BI dashboards and Excel models (scenario planning, sensitivity analysis, constraints modeling).
• Use ERP/MRP (SAP preferred) for master data, routings, BOMs, and capacity buckets; improve data quality where needed.
• Drive standard work for capacity planning across plants; document…