Planning & Commercial Insights Manager

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The Planning & Commercial Insights Manager plays a critical cross-functional role within the S&OP organisation, acting as the key link between Commercial, Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Production, Quality Control and Logistics teams.

The role is responsible for creating end-to-end visibility of intake versus plan, proactively identifying material exceptions, and coordinating actions across functions to support informed commercial and operational decision-making.

This individual will ensure stakeholders have a clear understanding of product flow risks, supply constraints, and operational impacts on commercial performance, while helping to embed more structured, scalable reporting and communication processes across the business.

You'll be;

• Owning and maintaining a regular intake versus plan view at unit and SKU level, including changes in both quantity and timing.

• Providing clear, actionable visibility of performance against plan at the appropriate level of detail for commercial decision-making.

• Ensuring reporting reflects the latest operational and commercial assumptions across the supply chain.

Exception Identification & Investigation:

• Proactively identifying and investigating material variances between intake and plan.

• Escalating significant movements, risks and opportunities to the appropriate commercial and operational stakeholders.

Analysing and communicating root causes of exceptions across the end-to-end supply chain, including:

• Demand planning assumptions.

• Purchase order creation and amendments.

• Factory quality control issues.

• Shipment and logistics delays.

• Warehouse quality control holds.

Translating operational impacts into clear commercial implications, including:

• Unit impacts by customer/channel.

• Revenue and budget implications.

• Risks to customer fulfilment and launch timing.

Cross-Functional Coordination, Acting as a central coordination point across:

• Demand Planning.

• Supply Planning / S&OP.

• Production and Quality teams.

• Logistics.

• Commercial & Account teams.

• Leading regular cross-functional reviews to understand operational issues, validating root causes and aligning on proposed resolutions.

• Facilitating timely communication of issues, trade-offs and decisions to relevant stakeholders.

• Supporting commercial teams in evaluating mitigation actions, including allocation decisions, air freight requirements and customer prioritisation.

Commercial Decision Support:

• Providing data-driven insights and recommendations to support commercial decision-making.

• Helping evaluate customer allocation proposals where supply is constrained.

• Ensuring commercial stakeholders have visibility of key operational risks and their potential business impact.

• Supporting the balancing of customer service, operational feasibility and commercial priorities.

Process Improvement & Reporting:

• Identifying opportunities to systematise reporting and reduce reliance on manual and ad-hoc communications.

• Partnering with BI and S&OP teams to improve reporting clarity, usability and automation.

• Helping embed scalable reporting processes into BAU routines and governance forums.

• Contributing to the continuous improvement of S&OP communication and visibility across the wider organisation.

Demand Visibility Support:

• Supporting the development and maintenance of longer-term customer demand visibility where required.

• Coordinating with commercial/account teams to consolidate constrained and unconstrained demand views to support planning processes.

You'll have;

• A strong analytical and problem-solving mindset with the ability to interpret operational data and translate it into commercial insights.

• Excellent skills in stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skills.

• The ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced operational environment.

• Strong attention to detail combined with commercial judgement.

• The ability to be comfortable working across both strategic planning and day-to-day operational execution.

• Advanced Excel and reporting capability; experience with planning or ERP systems preferred.