Buyer/Planner

**Description**

*Position at Latham Pool Products, Inc*

**Primary Role:** Plans, schedules and coordinates raw material stocking in order to meet targeted safety stock levels and production schedules. Works closely with production, scheduling and master planning to convert the demand plan and orders into raw material requirements. Interacts with suppliers on volume forecasting, orders management, lead time maintenance, and expediting of delayed and stocked out materials. Communicates frequently to operations and scheduling on delays that will impact customer orders and stocking levels. May also, perform scheduling activities for production at one or multiple plants.

**Duties and Responsibilities:**

* Review and monitor material requirements to identify overdue materials and track and plan material deliveries.

* Generate purchase requisitions as necessary to support production requirements.

* Analyze short and long-term sales trends, master schedule and forecasts to provide accurate forecasting for material purchases.

* Focus on achieving desired results and objectives with tools available. Will require learning MRP tool (system21) and sales configuration systems to effectively analyze and report on requirements. Output examples of these tools would be material action reports, stock outs, delays, material requisitions.

* Understand Bill of Material structure and utilize engineering change order process and system as required to ensure accurate material requirements.

* Understand role of key suppliers and the supply chain in whole. Develop positive relationships with all outside supplier contacts to enable the most effective planning and purchasing of raw materials.

* Review and coordinate inventory control processes and procedures with operations group to ensure system inventory accuracy. This would include comprehensive cycle count procedure.

* Monitor and review corporate inventory on all identified product lines and complete inter-divisional transfers of goods as required.

* Understand relationship of material availability to conversion of the material within manufacturing to finished goods, and therefore, preparing the most effective raw material plan possible. Purchasing plans should align with corporate inventory objectives and all customer charter needs.

* Support stocking strategy planning for raw material and intermediate materials in order to support the changing future forecasts/master plan.

* Understand plant capacity and how this affects raw material consumptions.

* Support production scheduling as required in order to meet the committed dates to the customers.

* Work closely with internal teams in Supply Chain, Planning and Procurement and Logistics groups, as well as Accounts Payable teams. Critical to work with procurement on supplier relationship management, service, etc

* Coordinate expediting of raw material as required. Provide accurate tracking of arrival dates.

* Support Outsourcing requirements as required to meet customer needs.

* Support/Manage intra-plant stock transfers to ensure inventory availability for operations.

**Qualifications/Skills:**

* Bachelors degree desired; greater than 5 years related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience in ERP systems, eg. Oracle/GIAC.

* Experience in managing raw materials requirements in a fast paced, high volume production/manufacturing environment.

* Experienced and very proficient in xcel, access, and other software. Ability to create complex spreadsheets and manage massive amounts of data into a simple output.

* Very strong communication skills, both written and verbal. Examples of multi-tasking and managing multiple levels of communication with suppliers, logistics partners, plants, and internal stakeholders.

* Highly analytical.

* Demonstrated agility, ability to multi-task and move from priority to priority with frequent changes in needs, requirements due to unexpected delays and events.

* Ability to make timely decisions while including appropriate people in decision-making process.