Designation: Senior Manager
Role Summary:
The Demand Planner is responsible for creating, maintaining, and improving the rolling demand forecast for assigned markets, products, and customers across formulations and APIs. The role consolidates inputs from sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain to generate a consensus demand plan that drives production, procurement, and inventory decisions. By balancing historical data, market intelligence, and statistical models, the Demand Planner supports high service levels, optimized inventory, and better utilization of manufacturing capacity for domestic and export businesses.
Key Duties and Responsibilities:
Forecasting and Demand Planning
- Develop and maintain rolling monthly and weekly demand forecasts at appropriate levels (SKU, market, customer, and channel) for formulations and selected APIs.
- Use a combination of statistical models, historical sales trends, seasonality, and commercial intelligence to generate baseline forecasts.
- Incorporate inputs from product managers, sales teams, tender teams, and finance (promotions, new launches, price changes, tenders, and portfolio changes).
- Continuously review forecast accuracy and bias; identify root causes of forecast error and implement corrective actions.
S&OP / IBP Support
- Prepare demand review files and analytics (volume/value, key variances, risks and opportunities) for S&OP/IBP meetings.
- Facilitate pre-demand and demand review discussions with sales, marketing, and finance to reach consensus on the demand plan.
- Highlight demand risks and upside opportunities, including tenders, large deals, regulatory approvals, and new market entries.
- Align the final demand plan with supply planning, ensuring clear communication of prioritization and scenario assumptions.
Market, Customer, and Portfolio Insights
- Track market trends, competitor movements, tender calendars, brand performance, and channel behavior to refine forecasts.
- Work closely with marketing and sales to understand promotional plans, brand strategies, and lifecycle events (launch, growth, maturity, decline).
- Monitor demand patterns across domestic trade, institutions, government tenders, and export markets.
- Support product rationalization, phase-in/phase-out, and portfolio optimization decisions with demand data and projections.
Data, Systems, and Analytics
- Maintain accurate demand-related master data (forecast hierarchies, product groups, customer segments) in planning tools and ERP.
- Use demand planning or advanced planning systems (where available) to manage statistical models and generate baseline forecasts.
- Develop, track, and publish demand KPIs such as forecast accuracy, bias, and adherence to forecast submission timelines.
- Ensure quality of input data (sales history cleansing, outlier treatment, event tagging) to improve statistical forecast reliability.
Cross-functional Collaboration
- Act as the key interface between commercial teams and supply planning, translating commercial plans into operational demand signals.
- Work with finance to align demand forecasts with financial projections and annual operating plans.
- Collaborate with supply planners and manufacturing to understand constraints and participate in scenario analysis when demand changes significantly.
- Support communication with regulatory and QA teams regarding demand linked to new approvals, batches for stability, and validation projects.
Continuous Improvement
- Identify and implement improvements in forecasting processes, calendars, templates, and governance.
- Participate in projects related to S&OP/IBP maturity, system upgrades, and analytics capability building.
- Share best practices and contribute to the development of demand planning SOPs and training materials for junior planners.
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Pharmacy, Engineering, Statistics, Commerce, or related field.
- Typically 3–6 years of experience in demand planning, forecasting, or commercial planning, preferably in pharmaceuticals, FMCG, or other demand-driven industries.
- Working knowledge of ERP systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle) and intermediate to advanced proficiency in Excel.
- Exposure to basic forecasting/statistical concepts (moving averages, regression, seasonality, trend analysis).
- Understanding of pharmaceutical market dynamics (brands vs generics, tenders, trade channels, export markets) is highly desirable.
- Strong numerical aptitude, analytical skills, and attention to detail.
- Good communication and stakeholder management skills to work effectively with sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Postgraduate degree or diploma in Supply Chain Management, Operations, Business Analytics, or MBA (Operations/Marketing/Finance).
- Experience in a formulations and/or API manufacturing company with multi-market exposure (domestic plus exports).
- Familiarity with dedicated demand planning tools or APS platforms (e.g., SAP IBP, APO, Kinaxis, Blue Yonder, Anaplan).
- Professional certification such as APICS CPIM/CSCP, IBF (Institute of Business Forecasting) certifications, or equivalent.
- Experience participating in formal S&OP/IBP cycles and working with commercial finance teams on volume/value forecasting.
Key Skills and Competencies:
- Forecasting and Analytics: Ability to interpret data, build and critique forecasts, and explain variances.
- Business acumen: Understanding how demand drives revenue, margin, and capacity needs in a pharma context.
- Collaboration: Strong interpersonal skills to align diverse commercial and operational stakeholders.
- Problem-solving: Structured approach to handling demand volatility, data gaps, and conflicting inputs.
- Systems orientation: Comfort working with ERP/planning tools and willingness to adopt new digital solutions.
- Discipline and ownership: Adherence to planning calendars, deadlines, and data quality standards.
