Sr. Planner

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and communicate detailed production schedules based on customer demand, inventory requirements, available capacity, and manufacturing constraints.
• Convert customer orders, forecasts, and master production requirements into practical production plans.
• Establish production priorities and sequencing to maximize throughput, minimize downtime, and meet customer delivery commitments.
• Plan production across multiple work centers and manufacturing processes, including wire drawing, stranding, cabling, extrusion, jacketing, annealing, spooling, and packaging.
• Balance machine capacity, labor availability, tooling, materials, changeover requirements, and production lead times.
• Identify schedule conflicts and proactively develop recovery plans.
• Monitor daily production performance against the plan and adjust schedules as required.
• Cross-functional coordination:
  • Work closely with Production Supervisors and Managers to ensure schedules are achievable and aligned with available resources.
  • Partner with Sales and Customer Service to establish realistic customer delivery dates and communicate changes to commitments.
  • Cook with Purchasing regarding raw material availability, supplier lead times, and material constraints.
  • Work with Quality and Engineering on nonconforming material, product changes, process changes, and new-product requirements.
  • Participate in daily production meetings and provide updates on schedule attainment, constraints, and recovery actions.
  • Escalate potential customer-impacting issues promptly and recommend corrective actions.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain Management, Operations, Business, Industrial Engineering, or a related field preferred.
• 5+ years of experience in production planning, scheduling, materials planning, or supply chain within a manufacturing environment.
• Experience in wire, cable, electrical products, metals, plastics, extrusion, or other continuous/process manufacturing environments strongly preferred.
• Strong understanding of MRP, production scheduling, capacity planning, inventory management, and manufacturing processes.
• Experience working with an ERP system such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Infor, Epicor, or similar.
• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Excel, including pivot tables, lookups, formulas, and data analysis.
• Strong analytical, organizational, problem-solving, and communication skills.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a fast-paced manufacturing environment.
• Demonstrated ability to work effectively with production, purchasing, sales, engineering, quality, and management teams.

Preferred Experience

• Experience planning products with complex routings, multiple manufacturing stages, or make-to-order requirements.
• Knowledge of copper and aluminum wire manufacturing processes.
• Understanding of extrusion, stranding, cabling, jacketing, shielding, spooling, and finished-wire/cable operations.
• Experience with finite-capacity scheduling and constraint management.
• APICS/ASCM certification such as CPIM or CSCP.
• Experience with Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, or S&OP processes.