Demand Planning Business Partner

At Hasbro, our mission is to entertain and connect generations of fans through the wonder of storytelling and exhilaration of play. We’re looking for adventurous and curious people who want to explore, experiment, and innovate to come up with the best ideas. Our culture has inspired our diverse team of highly skilled, highly creative, and highly committed individuals for 100 years and we believe the best is yet to come.

As a Demand Planning Business Partner, you will work on delivering accurate and timely demand forecasts to input to the IBP Demand Review process enabling commercial teams & Global supply chain operations to maximise Hasbro’s profit & customer satisfaction.

While primarily responsible for the Demand Plan, there is a need to balance all aspects of the Supply Chain, partnering with key stakeholders locally and globally to stabilise the unconstrained plan, and escalate through the S&OE process to minimise Shortages, whilst achieving high Demand Forecast Accuracy results. In addition, this role is responsible for adherence to the planning process and will be the key point of contact for commercial stakeholders for Hasbro Pacific.

**Responsibilities**:

- Complete history cleaning activities ensuring all adjustments and assumptions are recorded eg market trends, seasonality, promotions
- Maintain all statistical parameters used to drive ‘best fit’ model & generate a baseline for 18-24mths statistical forecast model and product hierarchies
- Undertake weekly check on planning data integrity - Own the signal being passed to supply chain, ensuring its accuracy
- Analyse all sales vs forecasting exceptions utilising Logility/Power BI/SAP and make ongoing forecasting corrections
- Analyse market trends, seasonality, promotions to add value to the baseline statistical forecast
- Review POS trends to understand customer sell out & stock levels at retail, along with stock in transit data & build insights into the forecast where appropriate
- Facilitate local Management demand review (pre and post Demand Review) and approval of forecast before end of Demand Planning cycle
- Analyse and report risk and opportunities included in the transmitted forecast
- Responsible for managing any market intelligence to the baseline volume driven by new product introductions, promotions, price increases and any other commercial activity that may affect demand based on analytical assumptions
- Ensure local brand forecasts aligned with regional brand strategy in cooperation with reg. DP category lead
- Contribute to product rationalization and portfolio optimization
- Provide commercial partners with clear and direct communication on constrained vs. unconstrained Demand Plan, and PhaseIn/PhaseOut management
- Ensure compliance with the global forecasting calendar
- Liaise with Market Distribution Planner to proactively communicate demand changes impacting inventory and service
- Track the Demand management KPIs (example FC Accuracy / FC Bias), identify the root cause of forecasting error and work with the relevant teams on improvement plans
- Collect and pressure-test Sales and Market Intelligence for input into forecast, providing fact-based assumption on historic shipments/POS.

**Qualifications And Skills**:

- Highly skilled in Demand Planning Management (5 years+)
- APICs or IBF certification desirable
- Secondary/Tertiary level mathematical or statistical qualification
- Experience in working with Business / Sales teams with ability to influence and coach
- Comfortable working with large data-sets and high SKU counts, with up to 60% NPI annually
- Proficient with Visual data presentation, PowerBI, PowerPoint
- Has worked in international matrix environment
- Advanced Excel skills
- Excellent influencing, stakeholder engagement and interpersonal skills
- Business partnering at the core with the ability to challenge senior stakeholders and hold tension in S&OP conversations to drive the right outcome for Hasbro
- Exceptional communication skills, verbal, written, and presentation
- Strong mathematical, statistical and analytical skills
- Solid understanding of E2E supply Chain operational processes, eg. Supply planning, logistics, product development cycles, POS replenishment
- Proficient in a statistical Demand Planning software - Performance management: the role holder will understand the importance of KPI’s in driving performance, know how to track their targets and correct as appropriate
- Continuous improvement - the role holder will be expected to be flexible and embrace change, continually looking for ways to improve everything they do. They will use various continuous improvement tools and techniques to solve problems
- Thinks and operates in a global context
- Good understanding of product, brand building, internal process and market / customer environment
- Strong decision making using data and following through to completion
- Analyses and uses data to achieve company goals, drives execution, in