Strategic Planner

The principle purpose of the Strategic Production Planner at Cambrex Charles City, Inc is to develop, maintain, and optimize the long-term schedule of the production facility.  The production schedule needs to align manufacturing capacity, supply available and customer demand with overall business demand.  This needs to be done while smoothing manpower demands and keeping inventory levels to a minimum working level.  

• Complete a long term and rolling production schedule based on sales orders and forecast, capacity strategy, considering inventory levels and safety stock, controlled substance manufacturing quotas and manpower demands.
• Analyze capacity utilization, bottlenecks, and constraints; recommend actions to optimize throughput and flexibility.
• Responsible for supervising Production Planning personnel, including workload distribution, performance management, training, and ensuring departmental goals are met.

• Collaborate closely with Sales, Finance, Operations, Project Management and Engineering to align demand forecasts with production capabilities.
• Translate demand and supply plans into executable production strategies across work centers.

• Support strategic initiatives such as optimization, capacity expansion, and new product introductions.

• Lead meetings with various departments to review long term production schedule and contingency plans.

• Work with business directors, project managers and customer service to continuously update long term schedule to meet customer needs along with maintaining plant utilization.

• Capable of working with ERP and other scheduling programs to develop the most efficient schedule while meeting customer needs and staying within any quota demands.

• Use ERP, MRP, contingency plans, and planning tools to model scenarios, monitor performance, and identify improvement opportunities or contingency plans.
• Develop contingency plans as needed by creating an effective schedule and produce reports for alternative schedules based on equipment / forecast demand.

• Maintain and update scheduling as needed with changes to facility assets, manpower constraints, and process changes.

• Analyze schedule performance including plant capacity, plant utilization, and schedule adherence.

• Demonstrate excellent time management, organizational, and problem-solving skills to ensure that production schedule run smoothly

• Backup for short-term production planning and other production planner duties.

• Other activities relating to assigned departmental mission not specifically detailed in this section.

• Strong communication skills
• Proficiency in ERP systems

• Associate Degree in Business Management or engineering degree
• At least 5 years production planning / supply chain management experience