Sales & Operations Planning Manager

About the role

Manages a team of planning analysts and/or supervisors with a focus on setting tactical objectives and operational plans that directly impact short-term supply chain performance. Leads planning activities across demand forecasting, supply planning, and inventory optimization, ensuring alignment with broader business and supply chain strategies. Develops and refines planning processes, tools, and standards to improve service levels, inventory health, and cost-to-serve. Applies best practices and cross-functional insights to address planning challenges that involve collaboration with manufacturing, procurement, finance, and commercial partners. Analyzes complex planning scenarios requiring input from multiple disciplines, and guides the team in evaluating trade-offs across service, cost, and risk. Interacts regularly with senior leadership to provide insight into planning performance, supply risks, and business impacts, and plays a key role in cross-functional initiatives such as S&OP or product lifecycle transitions. Effectively influences stakeholders in high-impact or ambiguous situations, balancing competing priorities while maintaining collaborative relationships across the organization and with external partners. POSITION PROFILE: (Basic Purpose of Position) The S&OP Manager, based in Avantor's Pune, India office, leads the offshore supply chain planning support team that enables Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) and Sales and Operations Execution (S&OE) routines. The role manages team delivery, analytics, governance, master data support, performance reporting, and decision-support capabilities that help onshore global S&OP and regional stakeholders execute those routines effectively. This position partners with global and regional planning, operations, finance, commercial, procurement, quality, product management, IT, and other cross-functional leaders to translate business priorities into clear team deliverables, improve planning visibility, strengthen process discipline, and support decisions that balance customer service (OTIF/backorder), manufacturing effectiveness, inventory investment, capacity utilization, cost, and shelf-life risk. MAJOR JOB DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: (List in order of importance) Global Business Partnering and Stakeholder Management - Serve as the Pune-based business partner for onshore and regional S&OP/S&OE stakeholders across planning, operations, commercial, procurement, finance, quality, product management, IT, and manufacturing teams. - Proactively align with cross-functional leadership to understand business needs, constraints, escalations, and changing priorities; translate them into clear action items for the Pune supply chain support team. - Maintain regular stakeholder engagement to review progress, course-correct priorities, address escalations within reasonable time frames, and ensure Pune team deliverables remain aligned with business requirements. - Contribute to the success of the Pune planning/operations support model by engaging in leadership initiatives, driving assigned KPIs, and promoting a One Avantor team culture. S&OP/S&OE Support, Governance, and Business Results - Lead the offshore team that supports S&OP/S&OE routines through analytics, meeting preparation, assumptions tracking, decision logs, action-item follow-up, performance reporting, and issue escalation support. - Partner with S&OP and process owners to ensure weekly and monthly routine inputs are accurate, timely, standardized, and actionable. - Translate S&OP strategy into tactical team deliverables that support short-term execution and medium- to long-term supply planning decisions. - Enable delivery of leadership review materials with actionable insights, clear variance drivers, risks, opportunities, and recommended actions related to demand/supply imbalance, inventory, fulfillment, capacity, and service performance. - Support regional/segment/site leaders by developing scalable Pune support models, process champions, standard work, and functional expertise across planning analytics, capacity planning, reporting, and master data governance. Network Capacity Planning and Planning Analytics - Oversee network capacity planning support, including tracking supply response imbalances, capacity constraints, production/supply risks, fulfillment issues, and medium- to long-term changes in customer demand. - Ensure the team provides timely analysis to site planning and operations teams to support capacity plan changes when demand differs from the Integrated Operating Plan (IOP). - Strengthen the analytics culture within the Pune supply chain team by using data to highlight improvement areas, risks, opportunities, and business decision points. - Guide development of dashboards, analytical models, and planning tools using Excel, Power BI, Tableau, SAP, and other systems to improve visibility and scenario planning. - Promote the use of best-fit and what-if analysis, class/ch

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