Demand Planner

About the Team

Our Merchandise Planning and Allocation (MP&A) teams are the driving forces behind making the organization’s product visions available to our consumers through calculated and strategic measures. Your involvement in sales and margin forecasts, promotional performance analysis, inventory management, and vendor relationships will play a critical role in obtaining goals while maintaining Pet Smart’s reputation in the market as a trusted partner to pet parents.

At Pet Smart, teamwork and connection are core to how we thrive. This role is based at our Phoenix Home Office, with an expectation of working a minimum of four days in the office each week. In a standard work week, associates may work up to one remote “flex day” (with leader approval). Our hybrid approach is designed to foster strong collaboration while also supporting flexibility and individual success.

As a Demand Planner you are directly responsible for the following within their book of business:

• Store Instocks and Fill Rate
• Purchase Order Creation and Management
• Purchase Order On Time Ship and Fill Rate
• Inventory Forecasting
• Inventory Turnover and Open To Buy

Demand Planners own inventory from beginning at purchase order creation to end at point of sale. Inventory management spans across seasonal, inline, and one-time-buy programs. This position is responsible for ensuring correct inventory quantities are on hand at all distribution centers to support store sales demand and merchandising objectives. They are responsible for instore instocks, keeping all stores full and supporting presentation minimum requirements.

Forecast accuracy at a sku/store level is critical and demand planners constantly utilize demand planning system to assess forecasts and other inventory levers.

A Demand Planner is an integral part of the merchandising cross functional team responsible for all key inventory management metrics. As a member of the cross functional team, collaboration with buying, planning, store operations, supply chain, and vendors is essential to achieving sales, margin, and inventory goals. Additionally, thorough communication to the cross functional team and the Demand Planning manager is critical to ensure appropriate business decisions are made in a timely manner.

Responsible for establishing and maintaining vendor relations and management of vendor order projections. Key contact for vendors and DC’s in supporting smooth order flow and PO issue resolution.

A Demand Planner should be able to balance strong execution of the fundamental job responsibilities with strategy thought. The ability to dig in and find opportunities, articulate those opportunities, and then create strategies and action plans to address them is critical to personal success and long‑term business growth.

• Achieves Sales, Margin, Inventory Turnover, and other KPIs as outlined in Plan and Forecast
• Develop overall division strategy vision, policies, resources, and execution plans to align to the corporate strategy
• Participates in the seasonal, annual, and long-range strategic and financial planning across a wide array of vendor (direct and external), customer, and merchandising segments
• Use consumer insights and data combined with a structured test and learn approach to maximize growth opportunities
• Leads, initiates and measure performance against the business planning and product creation calendars to initiate timely and informed decision making
• Supports the VP & Director to present within various strategic meetings for the division (i.e. Open-To-Buy, Vendor, Q , and other meetings)
• Owns the end-to-end management of demand planning and allocation optimization, including in-stock and service levels for funded items and promotional product; set targets and achieves plans for inventory and space productivity required to support the sales, gross margin and in-stock plans, maintain high levels of promotional product availability during promotional periods while minimizing ad residue, and optimizing end-caps, aisle, and in-line story telling and integration consistent with consumer shopping patterns.
• En…