Senior Supply Chain Planner

A typical week often involves planning oversight, S&OP leadership, cross-functional engagement, and the steady cadence of senior advisory work — overseeing demand and supply planning runs, leading consensus meetings, working with senior operations and commercial teams on consequential decisions, mentoring newer planners. You're often the senior planning voice when planning decisions affect significant inventory or service positions. Forecast accuracy, inventory turns, and service levels anchor the operating view.

Friction tends to come from the simultaneity of upstream and downstream volatility — suppliers shift, demand moves, and the senior planner finds the middle path that limits damage across the network. Variance across employers is sharp: at major CPG and industrial firms senior planning has mature S&OP infrastructure; at smaller or growing firms the senior planner builds the process alongside the work.

It fits people who are analytically deep, commercially fluent, and politically deft in cross-functional debate. APICS CPIM, CSCP, and senior planning credentials anchor advancement. The trade-off is the perpetual second-guessing when plans miss — every variance gets explained even when the underlying business is genuinely volatile.