Demand & Strategic Planning Manager

Job Description

Job Description

Role Type: Full-time

Report to: Chief Operating Officer

Wage: Salary, starting at $92k/year

Location: San Francisco, on-site/flexible

 

Demand & Strategic Planning Manager

 

About Us

Dandelion Chocolate is a bean-to-bar chocolate factory in San Francisco’s Mission District. We make chocolate from only two ingredients, cocoa beans and cane sugar, and travel to origins as often as we can to build good, trusting relationships with the producers who grow and ferment the beans we buy. The journey a bean takes to become a bar (or confection, experience, gift, or hot chocolate) involves careful planning and tracking that is almost inevitably accompanied by surprises: marketing plans change; demand fluctuates unexpectedly, finished goods arrive out of schedule, packaging components are held up in customs. Our small but mighty team looks to our Inventory & Strategic Planning Manager to forecast the sales of our items and ensure we have the right products in the right places at the right times in the right amount. Additionally, our Inventory & Strategic Planning Manager will help answer various types of “what if” questions to determine the most profitable course of action across an array of choices.

 

About the Role

You are a critical member of the broader Inventory Management team at the hub of all business operations – production, receiving, retail, wholesale and our online store with oversight of finished goods – ensuring we don’t sell what we won’t have, we continuously sell what we do have, and we don’t say an item is out of stock when it is readily available. You work across multiple systems (SKULabs, Square, Shopify, Looker, remote warehouse inventory systems, home-grown tools, etc.) to provide thoughtful and accurate business intelligence reports with reliable numbers that drive our plans and financials. Additionally, you will partner closely with our Product Management, Creative, and Marketing teams to come up with accurate expectations for new item sales and profit based on historical sales from similar items, seasonality, and marketing efforts.

 

A Typical Day in the Life

No two days are alike! You review with Product Management concepts for proposed new items to launch in 9 months to develop sales expectations. Next is a meeting to review a change to our digital marketing spend strategy for the rest of this month, to ensure inventory needs are aligned. In the afternoon, you are due to send six-month forecasts to a collaborator, so you review all their sales forecasts and update inventory needs then email the co-manufacturer the revised data. Before wrapping up the day, you reallocate inventory across channels and present to the Exec Team a category level forecast for 2028 based on a possible real estate expansion strategy under consideration.

 

About You

You love systems, organization, and lean in to reconciling uncertainty (e.g. how much more can we sell if we increase production, when will the port open, why did sales exceed expectations last week) what is working and what needs to be improved. When you don’t have the answers, you will dig into the data or schedule a review with your cross-functional partners to figure it out. You consistently work with your Product Manager partners, partnering on new item development to determine the financial opportunity a new item represents and how that item will affect our overall seasonal rollup. Teamwork, camaraderie, and a little humor when something doesn’t go quite to plan will serve you well in an ever-changing environment like Dandelion.

 

Your Day-To-Day Entails:

• Forecasting and planning: Create and maintain weekly item-level demand and sales forecasts, and set stock notifications, based on the previous season’s results, seasonality, anticipated marketing impact, potential cannibalization from like-items, etc. Strategize inventory balance targets and inbound delivery flow based upon minimum order quantities, production batch sizes and lead times, availability of chocolate or other raw materials, case pack sizes, etc. Understand and manage the bill of materials for interrelatedness of raw materials and components, including chocolate, packaging, collateral, shipping materials, etc. Oversee product sales life-cycle by participating in launch planning, managing replenishment deliveries and executing sell-down / sell-out strategies. 
• Order Management: Place purchase orders with outside finished goods vendors, packaging / collateral suppliers, cafe supplies manufacturers, etc. 
• Service Level Management: Keep items in stock through inventory balancing across all sales channels and retail locations; monitor marketing efforts to react in-season to unexpected fluctuations in demand, partnering with outside vendors and internal manufacturing teams to adjust timing of receipts; utilize early-receipt, Buy Now Ship Later and other back-order management techniques to maximize profitable availability of goods.
• Strategic Planning: Maintain, publish and present weekly and monthly sales and business intelligence reports with the Executive team and cross-functional partners, including seasonal plan roll-ups, item / holiday / seasonal hindsights, etc. Define, create and present ad hoc analyses to facilitate a wide variety of business decisions, determining outcomes of different possible scenarios, answer “what if” questions, etc. 
• Partner with Manufacturing Planning Manager: Share demand forecasts with MPM to ensure chocolate allocations and production schedules cover future needs, and Confections / SF & LV Kitchen and Product Packaging / Making teams have accurate demand forecasts from which appropriate production schedules can be built.
• Evolving systems: As prudent, utilize AI or other technologies to evolve tools, automate repetitive steps, improve decision-making, build new reports, etc. to improve productivity and enhance your and team members’ business intelligence; build and use expertise in our Data Warehouse and associated reporting systems. 
• Expiration and sampling: Monitor best-by dates to ensure that food items are being sold at an appropriate pace to minimize waste. Partner with DC production teams and outside vendors to create and manage retail samples. 
• SKU management: Lead SKU creation process for new products / components / supplies, and issue and manage purchase orders. 
• OTB management: Build and maintain total spend forecasts across all planned items, providing monthly forecasts to Finance and the Executive team. 
• Other tasks as necessary

 

Requirements

• Planning expertise: You have two to five years of experience in sales forecasting or item-level planning. Bonus points for planning experience within the food world. 
• Team player: You’ll be working with multiple teams and personalities in a professional environment where you will prioritize projects on the fly and let teams know when their projects aren’t the highest priority. You will need to present complex data sets to all levels of the org clearly and concisely. Previous experience in a friendly professional environment or in another team-oriented setting will serve you well.
• Proven Vendor Relationship Skills: Our internal and external business partners look forward to working with you again (and again and again). You’ve maintained strong, multi-year vendor relationships including suppliers, distributors, reps - both domestically and internationally - over many years while also negotiating rates and handling missed expectations.
• Tech Skills: Expertise with spreadsheets, reporting, and presentations including Google Suite. Desire to learn and apply new technologies, especially. Previous technical know-how with the desire and ability to research and pick up new tools like AI-enabled tool building platforms, Shopify, warehouse management systems, back-order management systems, Square, etc. Working knowledge of data warehousing and advanced analytics systems.
• Authorized to work in the U.S.

 

Benefits

The benefits and perks continue beyond a robust chocolate education. Dandelion Chocolate constantly invests in our people and culture. All team members receive heavily subsidized medical, vision, and dental benefits as well as the option to enroll in our 401k program. All team members receive paid vacation time, holiday pay, and paid sick time. In addition, our team members enjoy commuter benefits, FSAs, chocolate tasting opportunities, and a range of opportunities to grow and develop within the company.

 

How to Apply

Dandelion is invested in team members who take ownership over their role and are interested in contributing in a bigger way with us. You will stand out from the crowd if your resume is accompanied by a cover letter with a few sentences about the best demand planning practices you’ve learned and how they might benefit Dandelion. We look forward to hearing from you!

 

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