📈 We're Hiring: Demand Planning Assistant / Specialist
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Entry-Level to Mid-Level
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a supply-chain-focused organization committed to creating accurate, actionable demand plans that help the business maintain product availability, optimize inventory investment, and respond effectively to changing market conditions.
Our teams collaborate across Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Inventory, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Procurement, Product, Logistics, and Operations to translate market signals and commercial plans into reliable demand forecasts.
The Role
We are seeking a detail-oriented Demand Planning Assistant / Specialist to support forecasting, demand analysis, statistical modeling, forecast maintenance, exception management, and cross-functional planning activities.
The successful candidate will analyze historical demand and market information, maintain SKU-level forecasts, identify changes in demand patterns, support S&OP/IBP processes, and communicate demand risks and opportunities to stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
- Support the organization's demand-planning and forecasting processes.
- Develop, maintain, and update demand forecasts for products, customers, channels, markets, and locations.
- Analyze historical sales, consumption, shipment, order, and demand data.
- Identify trends, seasonality, demand patterns, outliers, and structural changes.
- Prepare baseline statistical forecasts using approved forecasting methodologies.
- Evaluate forecast outputs and identify exceptions requiring planner intervention.
- Incorporate relevant commercial and market information into demand forecasts.
- Work with Sales teams to understand customer pipeline, opportunities, lost business, and expected changes in demand.
- Collaborate with Marketing teams regarding campaigns, promotions, advertising activities, and market initiatives that may affect demand.
- Coordinate with Product teams regarding new product launches, product changes, substitutions, and discontinuations.
- Incorporate promotional calendars, pricing changes, launches, seasonal events, and other demand drivers into forecasts.
- Support demand planning for new products where historical sales data is unavailable.
- Develop initial demand estimates using market potential, comparable products, customer commitments, sales input, and other relevant assumptions.
- Support product phase-in and phase-out forecasting.
- Identify potential obsolete inventory risks resulting from declining or discontinued demand.
- Monitor forecast accuracy at SKU, product-family, customer, channel, market, and location levels.
- Calculate and report forecast accuracy using appropriate measures.
- Analyze forecast bias and identify systematic over- or under-forecasting.
- Monitor forecast error and investigate significant deviations between forecast and actual demand.
- Identify root causes of forecast inaccuracies.
- Recommend improvements to forecasting assumptions, models, or inputs.
- Maintain accurate forecast data in ERP, demand-planning, or supply-chain planning systems.
- Ensure forecast updates are completed according to established planning calendars.
- Manage forecast versions and maintain appropriate documentation.
- Maintain product, customer, location, and demand-planning master data.
- Identify incorrect or outdated planning parameters and coordinate corrections.
- Develop demand-planning reports, dashboards, and analytical summaries.
- Monitor key demand indicators and communicate significant changes to stakeholders.
- Prepare daily, weekly, monthly, and periodic demand-planning reports as required.
- Support the development of executive-level demand insights and planning materials.
- Participate in demand-review meetings with Sales, Marketing, Product, Finance, and Supply Chain teams.
- Collect and consolidate input from commercial and operational stakeholders.
- Challenge assumptions constructively using historical data, market evidence, and analytical insights.
- Facilitate consensus around demand assumptions where required.
- Document significant forecast changes and the rationale behind them.
- Support the preparation of demand plans for S&OP/IBP cycles.
- Provide demand inputs for supply-planning and inventory-planning processes.
- Coordinate with Supply Planning teams to highlight capacity, material, or supply constraints that may affect demand fulfillment.
- Identify demand risks associated with supply shortages or allocation constraints.
- Support scenario planning for alternative demand assumptions.
- Develop what-if analyses for changes in price, promotion, market growth, customer demand, product availability, and other variables.
- Assess the potential impact of upside and downside demand scenarios.
- Support contingency planning for significant demand fluctuations.
- Monitor customer and market signals that could materially affect forecasts.
- Analyze order patterns, cancellations, backlog, customer commitments, and changes in buying behavior.
- Monitor market trends and competitor developments where relevant.
- Use external market intelligence and internal commercial information to enhance demand assumptions.
- Analyze demand by customer segment, geographic market, distribution channel, product category, and sales territory.
- Identify high-growth and declining segments.
- Support sales-target and commercial-planning activities with demand analysis.
- Provide demand insights for revenue and business planning.
- Support financial planning and budgeting by providing demand forecasts and scenario assumptions.
- Work with Finance to reconcile demand forecasts with revenue plans and business budgets.
- Investigate material differences between commercial forecasts and financial plans.
- Support inventory-planning decisions by identifying expected changes in demand.
- Work with Inventory Planning teams to identify potential stockouts, excess inventory, and service-level risks.
- Provide demand inputs for safety-stock and replenishment decisions.
- Coordinate with Procurement regarding demand changes that may affect purchasing requirements.
- Support supplier planning by communicating significant forecast changes.
- Monitor supplier constraints and assess potential impacts on demand fulfillment.
- Work with Logistics teams to understand transportation constraints affecting customer demand fulfillment.
- Support demand planning during peak seasons, holidays, promotions, major events, and other demand-intensive periods.
- Prepare demand scenarios for seasonal peaks and anticipated market fluctuations.
- Monitor actual demand during peak periods and update forecasts as required.
- Support demand-planning activities for new markets, new channels, and geographic expansion.
- Develop demand assumptions for market-entry initiatives.
- Support business cases and commercial initiatives with demand estimates.
- Use advanced analytical tools to improve forecasting and demand visibility.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Performance will be measured through a combination of forecasting, planning, service, and business KPIs, including:
- Forecast accuracy
- Forecast bias
- Forecast error
- Forecast value-added
- Demand-plan adherence
- Forecast-update timeliness
- SKU forecast accuracy
- Product-family forecast accuracy
- Customer forecast accuracy
- Promotion forecast accuracy
- New-product forecast accuracy
- Stockout rate
- Inventory availability
- Order fill rate
- Service-level performance
- Demand-plan stability
- Forecast exception resolution
- S&OP/IBP cycle adherence
- Planning-data accuracy
- Forecasting process efficiency
Candidate Profile
The successful candidate should have experience in demand planning, forecasting, supply chain, inventory planning, commercial analytics, business analytics, or a closely related discipline.
This role is suitable for an analytical professional who enjoys working with data while collaborating with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Product, and Supply Chain stakeholders.
What You'll Bring
- Previous experience in demand planning, forecasting, supply chain, inventory planning, commercial analytics, or related fields.
- Strong understanding of demand-planning and forecasting principles.
- Strong analytical and numerical capabilities.
- Excellent attention to detail.
- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills.
- Experience analyzing historical sales and demand data.
- Understanding of forecast accuracy, forecast bias, seasonality, trends, and demand variability.
- Experience using ERP, MRP, demand-planning, or supply-chain planning systems.
- Ability to translate analytical findings into practical business recommendations.
- Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Product, Procurement, Inventory, and Supply Planning teams.
- Strong problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
- Knowledge of statistical forecasting techniques is advantageous.
- Familiarity with moving averages, exponential smoothing, regression, seasonal models, or other forecasting approaches is advantageous.
- Experience with S&OP or Integrated Business Planning (IBP) is advantageous.
- Experience with new-product forecasting and product lifecycle management is advantageous.
- Familiarity with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, R, or other analytical tools is advantageous.
- Experience with SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Kinaxis, o9, Blue Yonder, or similar planning platforms is advantageous.
- Understanding of inventory and supply-planning concepts is advantageous.
- Strong commercial awareness and ability to understand market drivers.
- High level of integrity, accountability, and analytical discipline.
- Ability to work independently and effectively within a fully remote environment.
- Relevant degree in Supply Chain Management, Business Analytics, Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Engineering, Finance, Business Administration, or a related discipline.
- Professional certifications in demand planning, supply chain, forecasting, or analytics are advantageous.
- Experience working with UAE or wider GCC markets is highly desirable.
- Arabic language proficiency is advantageous.