Demand Planner

Role Purpose

The Demand Planner owns the commercial demand signal and supports alignment around a consensus demand forecast. The role partners closely with Supply Chain and Planning but is distinct from production and supply planning. The Demand Planner focuses on what customers and the market are expected to require and when, while operational planning functions determine how those requirements are translated into production, capacity, material, and inventory plans.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and maintain the consolidated demand forecast across customers, projects, products, and planning horizons
• Support the Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP/SIOP) process by developing a consensus demand plan and clearly communicating assumptions, changes, risks, and opportunities.
• Develop demand forecasts using customer commitments, historical demand, commercial inputs, market intelligence, and documented business assumptions.
• Reconcile demand forecasts against the sales pipeline, contracts, purchase orders, and open sales orders to identify gaps or inconsistencies requiring review.
• Monitor customer pull-ins, push outs, cancellations, volume changes, project timing changes, and product-mix changes, and reflect relevant updates in the demand outlook.
• Analyze forecast versus actual performance, identify drivers of significant variances, and recommend corrective actions.
• Track and improve key demand-planning measures, including forecast accuracy and forecast bias.
• Develop base, upside, and downside scenarios to help the business evaluate changes in customer demand and commercial exposure.
• Provide clear demand visibility to Supply Chain and Planning to support downstream capacity, production, inventory, and material planning.
• Develop and maintain demand-planning reports, dashboards, assumptions, and supporting analytics.
• Identify opportunities to improve forecasting processes, data quality, reporting, and integration between Commercial and operational planning.

Experiences/Education - Required

• Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain, Business, Operations, Finance, Analytics, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience in demand planning, commercial operations, sales operations, supply chain planning, business analytics, or a related role.
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills, with the ability to translate complex data into clear business insights.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel and experience working with large datasets.
• Experience working with forecasts, customer demand, sales orders, inventory, or pipeline data.
• Strong attention to detail and commitment to data accuracy.
• Ability to communicate planning information clearly to commercial, operational, and leadership stakeholders.
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills and the ability to constructively challenge assumptions.
• Ability to operate effectively in a dynamic environment where customer priorities, project schedules, and business conditions can change quickly.

Experiences/Education - Desired

• Experience with SAP planning solutions, or a comparable ERP and planning environment.
• Experience working with CRM and sales pipeline data.
• Experience participating in S&OP, SIOP, IBP, or formal demand-review processes.
• Experience in manufacturing, solar, renewable energy, or a project-based business environment.
• Experience forecasting at the customer, product, SKU, or project level.
• Experience developing dashboards or automated demand-planning reports.
• Familiarity with statistical forecasting methods and forecast-performance measures such as weighted mean absolute percentage error (wMAPE) and forecast bias.