Manager - Business Planning - S&OP - Consumer Durables

Manager - Business Planning (S&OP) Function: Business Planning Reports to: Chief Business Officer Direct reports: Demand & Supply Planning Analysts Location: Bangalore ROLE SUMMARY: Lead monthly S&OP cycle across all channels (EBO, Trade - Distribution, Modern Trade, Franchise, E-commerce marketplace and D2C). The role is accountable for building and institutionalising the demand planning process, running a strong finished-goods and raw material supply plan, keeping inventory healthy on coverage and SLOB, and leading a planning team through the monthly cadence. It combines process ownership and people leadership with hands-on analytics. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES: Demand Planning - process ownership: - Design, document and continuously improve the end-to-end demand planning process: data inputs, statistical - ML baseline, consensus review, override governance and accuracy tracking. - Set accuracy and bias targets by channel and horizon; establish the review rhythm with Sales and Category and drive Forecast Value Add over a naive baseline. - Own primary (sell-in) vs. secondary (sell-out) reconciliation as a standing process, closing channel gaps and mis-tagging. Supply Planning: - Convert the consensus demand plan into finished-goods requirements, replenishment and production signals; manage capacity constraints and build-vs-hold decisions. - Plan raw-material and packing-material consumption from BOM - PR data; tie out to actuals and feed MRP and procurement. - Balance service and working capital: fill rate, weeks-of-cover and inbound-feed reliability. Inventory & SLOB: - Own FG inventory health: ABC x ageing, SLOB classification and provisioning, active vs. dropped SKUs, seasonal lifecycle and location-level cover. - Drive the liquidation, buy-stop and markdown agenda with Sales and Finance; report SLOB movement month-on-month. - Maintain the landed-cost - COGS MoM view and support sourcing with should-cost and negotiation inputs. Team Management: - Lead, coach and develop a team of planners; allocate ownership by channel - category and manage the monthly calendar to deadline. - Set standards for analytical rigour - correct totals, explicit period tags, documented data lineage - and review the team's output. - Build bench strength and cross-training so the cycle is not single-person dependent. Cross-functional: - Run the S&OP - consensus meeting; align Sales, Category, Production, Sourcing and Finance on one number. - Represent planning in new-launch, range-review, capacity and budget-vs-actual discussions. - Partner with Data - IT on the planning platform, pipelines and dashboards. QUALIFICATIONS & SKILLS: - 7 - 10+ years in demand - supply planning and S&OP, with process-building and team-management experience; consumer products - apparel - footwear - gear preferred. - Proven inventory management depth: ABC, ageing, SLOB, coverage and working-capital trade-offs. - Strong cross-functional influence; able to run consensus meetings and align senior stakeholders on one plan. - Analytically hands-on: SQL and Python, time-series - ML forecasting concepts, MRP - BOM logic; able to own data pipelines and BI dashboards, not just consume them. - Tools: Postgres, Python (pandas), Excel, Git; FastAPI - React exposure a plus.