DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Own and drive a disciplined, region-wide Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process, ensuring alignment across demand, supply, inventory, and capacity planning.
- Identify, prioritize, and lead continuous improvement initiatives across forecasting accuracy, production scheduling, inventory optimization, and supplier supply planning.
- Lead the exceptions management process, proactively identifying risks, gaps, and constraints, and enabling timely, fact-based trade-off decisions with key stakeholders.
- Structure, facilitate, and lead regional S&OP governance and review meetings, ensuring strong process discipline, accountability, and compliance.
- Establish, monitor and track key operational performance indicators (KPIs) including inventory health, service levels, forecast accuracy, and supply reliability.
- Drive actions to identify, reduce, and eliminate excess and obsolete (E&O) inventory, improving working capital efficiency.
KEY RELATIONSHIPS:
- Partner with the commercial organization to develop robust processes, systems, and tools that enable accurate product family and SKU-level demand forecasting.
- Collaborate with plant/site operations teams to translate demand forecasts into executable production plans, capacity plans, and inventory targets.
- Work closely with the sourcing and procurement teams to ensure supply planning, supplier capacity, and inventory strategies remain aligned with customer demand.
- Partner with global and regional S&OP leaders to align strategy, governance standards, best practices, and exceptions management.
- Collaborate with IT and digital teams to define, develop, and implement the regional S&OP systems roadmap, analytics, and tool strategy.
MEASURES OF PERFORMANCE
- Regional KPIs (Delivery, Inventory and Logistics cost, Lean maturity)
- Delivery of improved S&OP projects and processed with priority
- Best Practice/Idea Replication
- Benchmark Comparisons (Internal & External) for World Class Performance
- Achievement of regional operational KPIs, including delivery performance, inventory turns, logistics cost, service levels, and Lean maturity progression.
- Successful delivery of priority S&OP transformation and continuous improvement initiatives, with measurable business impact.
- Replication and scaling of best practices, innovations, and process improvements across sites and regions.
- Performance against internal and external world-class benchmarks, ensuring continuous competitiveness and operational excellence.
- Improvement in forecast accuracy, inventory optimization, and supply responsiveness.
QUALIFICATIONS:
- Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain, or related discipline, with a minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in operations, engineering, or supply chain leadership, including direct ownership of S&OP.
- Master's degree preferred.
- Experience in automotive or complex manufacturing systems is highly desirable.
- Strong hands-on experience in Lean Manufacturing, continuous improvement, and operational excellence methodologies.
REQUIRED SKILLS:
- Demonstrated project and program management expertise, including cross-functional coordination, communication, execution, governance, and post-implementation review.
- Deep knowledge of Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, statistical analysis, and structured problem-solving methodologies.
- Strong analytical and systems-thinking capabilities, with the ability to translate data into actionable business decisions.
- Highly results-oriented, with a track record of driving measurable business improvements and scalable process solutions.
- Proven ability to influence, coach, and align stakeholders across multiple organizational levels, functions, and geographies.
- Excellent executive-level communication, presentation, and facilitation skills, both verbal and written.
- Strong change leadership skills with the ability to drive adoption of new processes, systems, and behaviors.
