The Buyer/Planner orders raw/packaging materials to support finished good production at Kao plants or Contract Manufacturers, and creating finished good production plans for products produced at Contract Manufacturers. Reporting to the Demand and Supply Planning Manager, your primary goals will include optimizing inventory, ensuring high customer order fill rate, minimizing obsolete and slow moving, and ensuring cohesive and collaborative internal and external partnerships.

• Develop daily, weekly, or monthly ordering plans by reviewing forecast streams, demands for promotions, production schedules, and inventory positions at the SKU level. Balance orders against vendor capability and optimize inventory to support KPTs (Key performance targets).
• Place and monitor purchase orders to support production plans with consideration to minimum order requirements, lead times, cost effectiveness, batch splits, seasonality, and any upcoming restages, product changes and new product launches.
• Contribute to cross functional teams, including NPD (new product development), Consensus/Forecasting, Obsolete, Critical Sku Information reviews, Scheduling meetings, and others.
• Identify potential stock issues and communicate to cross functional groups to support effective prioritization and decision making in production scheduling or customer order fulfillment.
• Identify potential slow-moving or obsolete inventory and communicate to drive disposition and appropriate decision-making. Prevent and minimize by facilitating cross functional discussions.
• Lead vendor calls, supporting partnerships with domestic and international suppliers and affiliates.
• Track performance against Key Performance Targets (KPTs) and other objectives. This includes creating, updating, and distributing reports from SAP, Excel, BI, Word, and PowerPoint.
• Support Supply Chain special projects.