Production Planning Manager, GFS PPT

JOB DESCRIPTION
Amazon is a US-based multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Amazon. com started as an online bookstore, but soon diversified into many other categories, with a vision to be earths most customer-centric company & to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
Amazons Global Finance Solutions (GFS) team is a fast-paced, team-focused, dynamic environment and delivering great experiences for our customers is top priority. GFS is seeking a Production Planning Manager to support our production planning team (PPT).

Scope of Role:

The role leads a team of analysts and is responsible for labor planning activities across EU/IN Customer Fulfilment Network. The core functionality of the role is to lead the network planners and act as a Subject Matter Expert who can teach and influence all aspects of production planning tactically and strategically. The role is expected to be highly analytical, understand complex systems and influence the various stakeholders impacting labor planning, including FC Operations, Ops Finance, HR, S&OP and Workforce Staffing teams, in order to develop labor plans that are accurate and achievable across the FCs. The decisions made by this role can have a significant impact on inventory placement, associate experience and overall costs associated with how well the labor plan balances between the site and the network level constraints.

While planning and execution are critical to the roles success, the ability to communicate the short and long-term staffing strategy of the network is essential. The role is expected to develop the labor planning guidance, influence Ops Senior Leadership to commit to that guidance and then be able to communicate this guidance to hundreds of Ops, Finance and HR leaders within the FCs and monitor adherence in execution. This guidance would cover a wide array of topics such as volume variability, site execution, assumptions accuracy, market constraints and labor utilization. Due to the size and scale of the network, the role s ability to lead a team capable of communicating the strategy to leadership teams across the network is required in order to earn trust of these teams. This ability to build strong communication between PPT and the FC teams is a critical component to aid in the roles ability to anticipate forward-looking risks and implement timely solutions to mitigate these risks and balance network capacity across the FCs.

A holistic understanding of the value chain is required by the role to take actions which balance the need for maintaining healthy backlogs with CE and other related costs. To do this, the role is expected to possess an analytical approach in collaboration with teams such as S&OP, Capacity, and ACES (Ops Excellence) to implement long-term strategic initiatives which improve customer and associate experience while balancing FC labor and storage constraints. The role must also recognize the ever-present challenges with accuracy of the assumptions that go into labor planning and strive for deeper understanding of inputs and variation in planning assumptions which dictate the overall short and long term staffing outputs. To achieve the automation in labor planning and systematically eliminate immaterial decision making, the role is also responsible for education and adoption of the new automated tools that are developed by the Tech teams.

Job Responsibilities include:
Lead labor planning activities in EU, AU or MENA network for all FC types
Drives creation of quality initiatives, process change initiatives and other Lean initiatives to improve the Labor Planning process which ultimately enable the network to meet and exceed business plan.
Leverages the Production Planning and S&OP teams by sourcing and nurturing ideas, and rolling them into the creation of improvement plans for the Supply Chain Planning and execution.
Takes proactive steps to ensure that best practices in labor planning are shared across the network.
Manage others, develop exceptional talent, and encourage your team to challenge assumptions
Promote recruiting efforts across the network to continually hire and develop the best
Recommend, develop, and implement policies and programs that guide the organization in maintaining and improving its competitive position and profitability
Work with data source providers and technology teams to ensure that key decision data is accurate, automated and timely

Key Characteristics:
Proven expertise managing, evaluating, analyzing quickly and creating meaningful business reporting
Proven ability to develop strategic relationships with your business partners - you influence the decisions. You can root cause issues quickly and uncover core issues using data, then assist, consult with, and teach the business how decisions affect costs in their sites and create new mechanisms as they are needed
Proven ability to manage a team with competing priorities & provide level-headed guidance during unexpected events

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
BA/BS degree in Business, Engineering, Finance or similar discipline with analytical bias
6+ years relevant experience in positions that require analysis and reporting Operational and financial results
3+ years experience directly supervising teams and developing people
Demonstrated financial acumen and analytical experience delivering forecasting, budgeting, and variance analysis, and data interpretation of business impact and results
3+ years of experience with advanced proficiency in Excel (pivots, lookups, etc. )
Ability to travel; 10%+ travel expected, primarily to local operations, in addition to regional support