Overview of the Company
United Wheels Inc. (“UWI”) is an international, privately held business, with affiliated companies and operations in Asia, the Americas and around the world. UWI is a world leader in the design, manufacture and international distribution of bicycles, e-bikes, and rideable toys, manufacturing more than 6 million bicycles and e-Bikes each year. In additional to cycling, UWI is at the forefront of materials science though Allite Inc. and its affiliated companies, which utilizes its proprietary magnesium alloys across numerous industries (e.g., sporting goods, robotics, electronics, aerospace, etc.).
UWI owns and operates several bicycle-related subsidiaries. These subsidiaries include:
- Huffy Corp. (https://www.huffybikes.com/), the iconic bicycling company based in Dayton, Ohio, with more than 125+ years of bicycling history.
- Buzz Bicycles (https//.buzzbicycles.com)
- Batch Outdoors Inc. (https://www.batchbicycles.com/)
- Niner Brands International Inc. (https://ninerbikes.com/)
- VAAST Bicycles, (a division of Allite Inc.) (https://www.vaastbikes.com/)
Summary
The Senior Demand Planner is responsible for the consensus demand plan for their assigned responsibility and accountable for the UWI Global consensus demand plan. The consensus demand plan requires collaboration and alignment with Sales, Marketing, and Product Management Key Stakeholders, including senior leaders. The consensus demand plan is measured based on quality: accuracy, bias, and change frequency. Metric targets will be established as a team considering past performance and process maturity. Demand Planning is a young process, so balancing process and systems maturity improvement and plan quality will be important to this role’s success. Accurate and timely plans are critical for our internal cross functional partners, suppliers, B2B customers, and riders. This position reports to the SIOP Leader currently but will move to a vertical structure for promotional opportunity and skillset growth as the process maturity baseline is set and the company grows.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
- Creates the monthly consensus demand plan for their assigned parts.
- Review plan quality metrics and gather error root cause and lessons learned to apply to plan.
- Ensures product life cycle master data is accurate.
- Ensures other key planning master data is created and accurate.
- Review history and apply a basic statistical model for organic baseline.
- Run your Customer Demand Planning meetings to review demand plan and gain consensus from Sales, Marketing, and Product Management.
- Create necessary business intelligence to communicate the Consensus Demand Plan to all key stakeholders.
- Demand Consensus Meeting
- Reparse data, metrics, and other materials for the meeting.
- Lead the monthly meeting.
- Execute meeting document control: agenda, minutes, and actions on time.
- Participate in the Sales and Operations Execution Meetings for the regions and led by the supply planning team.
- Provide analytics and demand intelligence to support purchasing commitments.
- Partner with supply planning team for any large change needed urgently in lead time to obtain agreement prior to system change.
- Other duties may be assigned.
Continuous Improvement Projects
- Key thought leader to Plan for Every Part Master Data Standardization and Governance
- Participate in kaizen events, focused on process improvements.
Supervisory Responsibilities
No current supervisory responsibilities
Education and/or Experience
A passion for Cycling and the Outdoors!
Bachelor’s degree or 5+ years as a Demand Planner required.
Masters of Business Administration (MBA) or 3+ years as a Demand Planner required.
Experience in outdoor wheeled or battery-operated products is preferred but not required.
Interpersonal and Professional Skills:
Strategic and tactical communication and problem solving with a hands-on approach.
Excellent listening skills to understand problem statements from our internal key stakeholders.
Basic problem-solving skills to identify the root cause of a problem.
Change management and emotional intelligence skills to work through process and system changes in an organization.
Competencies
- Customer Focus - Aims to satisfy all customers while maintaining effective relationships, both internal and external. Maximizes those relationships to improve personal, department, and organizational performance. Holds co-workers and customers to a similar standard.
- Energy - Have a tremendous amount of energy and passion for our people, products, and brands. Approaches each date willing to take on the day’s challenges. Operating at their individual peak performance without encouragement.
- Energize - Energize teams with enthusiasm and excitement without intimidating them. Projects a positive mental attitude and can-do spirit, who lifts up members of his / her team. Does not get discouraged by setbacks.
- Edge - Have a competitive edge and an overwhelming desire to win. Hates losing and will give 100% commitment to achieving or exceeding their plan. Willing to make difficult decisions, when called upon.
- Execution - Action and performance oriented and are focused on attaining results. A team player who is reliable and follows through on tasks to completion. Attention to details.
- Increases Company Value - Strives to increase sales, reduce costs, improve efficiency, and maximize profits to increase the value of the Company.
- Innovative / Continuous Improvement - Committed to improving processes, products, services, and a willingness to embrace change for the benefit of our team, department, organization, and shareholders.
- Integrity - The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. Elevating challenges in order to collaborate with co-workers, SLT, ELT, and the Board.
Language Skills
Ability to read, analyze, and interpret standard supply chain reports and dashboards. Ability to respond effectively to sensitive inquiries or complaints. Ability to make effective and persuasive speeches and presentations on controversial or complex topics to senior leadership.
Mathematical Skills
Ability to apply concepts such as fractions, percentages, ratios, and proportions to practical situations.
Reasoning Ability
Ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions. Ability to interpret an extensive variety of technical instructions in mathematical or diagram form and deal with several abstract and concrete variables.
Computer Skills
Microsoft Office intermediate skills in Excel– Pivot tables, VLOOKUP's, intermediate formulas like standard deviation and forecasting
Microsoft Office basic skills – PowerPoint
Previous experience in an ERP environment – JDE Enterprise One ideal
Previous experience in Business Intelligence Tools – Reports and Dashboards
Previous experience in an Advanced Planning and/or a Demand Planning System a plus
Certificates, Licenses, Registrations
None Required.
