📈 We're Hiring: Demand Planning Manager
📍 Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
🕒 Employment Type: Full-Time
💼 Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior-Level
🌐 Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a data-driven organization focused on building a responsive, accurate, and commercially aligned supply chain.
Our teams collaborate across Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Sales, Marketing, Finance, Procurement, Operations, Inventory, Logistics, and Customer Service to translate market demand into reliable forecasts, optimized inventory, and effective business decisions.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Demand Planning Manager to lead the demand-planning function and establish a robust forecasting process across products, channels, customers, markets, and regions.
The successful candidate will own the demand-planning cycle, improve forecast accuracy, develop statistical and collaborative forecasts, identify demand risks and opportunities, coordinate the Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process, and translate commercial intelligence into actionable demand plans.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and manage the organization's demand-planning function.
- Develop and implement the demand-planning strategy.
- Establish standardized demand-planning processes, methodologies, calendars, and governance.
- Own the end-to-end demand-planning cycle.
- Establish monthly and weekly demand-planning routines.
- Develop statistical baseline forecasts.
- Combine historical demand, statistical models, market intelligence, commercial plans, and business assumptions to produce consensus forecasts.
- Establish appropriate forecasting methodologies by product, market, channel, customer, and demand profile.
- Analyze historical sales and consumption data.
- Identify demand patterns, seasonality, trends, lifecycle effects, promotions, and abnormal demand.
- Analyze demand variability and forecast bias.
- Develop short-, medium-, and long-term demand forecasts.
- Establish appropriate forecasting horizons and levels of granularity.
- Monitor forecast accuracy and identify areas requiring improvement.
- Analyze Forecast Accuracy, MAPE, WAPE, bias, forecast value added, and other relevant measures.
- Identify systematic forecast errors and develop corrective actions.
- Monitor over-forecasting and under-forecasting trends.
- Establish forecast-bias controls.
- Improve demand-signal quality and forecast reliability.
- Develop statistical forecasting models.
- Evaluate appropriate forecasting techniques based on demand characteristics.
- Use time-series analysis, moving averages, exponential smoothing, regression, seasonality models, and other appropriate methods.
- Evaluate intermittent-demand forecasting techniques where applicable.
- Incorporate new-product forecasting methodologies.
- Develop demand forecasts for products with limited historical data.
- Use analogues, market assumptions, product attributes, customer inputs, and commercial intelligence to forecast new products.
- Manage product lifecycle forecasting.
- Identify launch, growth, maturity, decline, and end-of-life demand patterns.
- Adjust forecasts for product introductions, substitutions, discontinuations, and portfolio changes.
- Coordinate demand plans during product transitions.
- Minimize obsolete inventory resulting from inaccurate lifecycle assumptions.
- Analyze promotional and marketing impacts on demand.
- Incorporate promotional calendars, campaigns, discounts, pricing changes, launches, and marketing activities into forecasts.
- Develop promotional forecasts and uplift assumptions.
- Analyze historical promotion effectiveness.
- Compare promotional forecasts against actual outcomes.
- Identify promotional cannibalization, forward buying, and post-promotion demand effects.
- Partner with Sales and Marketing to improve promotional forecasting.
- Lead the consensus-demand-planning process.
- Collect demand inputs from Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Finance, Operations, and other stakeholders.
- Challenge assumptions using historical evidence and analytical insights.
- Reconcile conflicting demand inputs.
- Establish consensus demand forecasts.
- Document significant assumptions, risks, opportunities, and overrides.
- Ensure forecast changes are traceable and explainable.
- Partner with Sales teams to incorporate customer intelligence into forecasts.
- Analyze customer forecasts, sales pipelines, contracts, tenders, and account plans where relevant.
- Evaluate customer-specific demand signals.
- Identify changes in customer purchasing behavior.
- Monitor major-account risks and opportunities.
- Incorporate credible commercial intelligence into demand plans.
- Challenge unsupported sales assumptions.
- Establish clear rules for sales forecast overrides.
- Partner with Marketing teams on campaign, launch, pricing, and promotional assumptions.
- Partner with Finance to align demand plans with budgets, business plans, and financial forecasts.
- Reconcile operational demand forecasts with financial expectations.
- Identify material differences between commercial and financial forecasts.
- Support annual budgeting and long-range planning.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Performance will be measured through a combination of forecasting, commercial, inventory, and supply-chain KPIs, including:
- Forecast accuracy
- WAPE
- MAPE where appropriate
- Forecast bias
- Forecast value added
- Demand-plan accuracy
- Forecast stability
- Forecast error
- Forecast override accuracy
- Forecast exception rate
- New-product forecast accuracy
- Promotional forecast accuracy
- Demand-plan adherence
- S&OP cycle compliance
- Demand-risk closure rate
- Stockout reduction
- Excess-inventory reduction
- Inventory turnover
- Service-level improvement
- Customer-order fulfillment
- Demand-planning cycle time
- Forecast automation rate
- Data-quality improvement
- Planner productivity
- Forecasting-model performance
- Budget-versus-demand variance
- Sales-and-operations-plan alignment
Candidate Profile
The successful candidate should have experience in demand planning, forecasting, supply chain planning, S&OP, commercial planning, inventory management, or a closely related discipline.
This role is suitable for an analytical and commercially minded planning leader who can combine statistical forecasting with business judgment and effectively challenge assumptions while maintaining strong relationships with Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Supply Chain teams.
What You'll Bring
- Proven experience managing demand planning and forecasting functions.
- Strong understanding of demand-planning principles and forecasting methodologies.
- Extensive experience with S&OP or Integrated Business Planning processes.
- Strong statistical and quantitative analysis skills.
- Experience with forecast accuracy, bias, WAPE, MAPE, and forecast-value-added analysis.
- Experience developing statistical baseline forecasts.
- Strong understanding of seasonality, trends, demand variability, promotions, and product lifecycle.
- Experience with new-product and promotional forecasting.
- Strong commercial awareness and understanding of customer and market drivers.
- Experience challenging and reconciling Sales and Marketing forecasts.
- Strong understanding of inventory and supply-chain implications of forecast uncertainty.
- Experience with scenario planning and demand-risk management.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills.
- Experience with ERP/MRP and demand-planning systems such as SAP, Oracle, Kinaxis, o9, Blue Yonder, Anaplan, or equivalent.
- Experience with Power BI, Tableau, SQL, Python, R, or advanced analytics tools is advantageous.
- Experience with AI or machine-learning forecasting is advantageous.
- Strong project-management and change-management capabilities.
- Excellent communication and executive-presentation skills.
- Strong stakeholder-management and influencing capabilities.
- Ability to distinguish statistically supported demand from aspirational commercial targets.
- Strong leadership and team-development capabilities.
- Ability to work independently and effectively within a fully remote environment.
- Relevant degree in Supply Chain Management, Business Analytics, Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, Engineering, Operations Management, or a related discipline.
- APICS/ASCM CPIM, CSCP, or equivalent professional certification is advantageous.
- Knowledge of UAE/GCC markets and regional demand patterns is advantageous.
- Arabic language proficiency is advantageous.