Director, S&OP

Farmer's Fridge Careers•Chicago, IL

6d•$170,000 - $190,000

About The Position

As the Director of S&OP, you will own the end-to-end Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process for our business that produces, ships, and stocks fresh food every single day. With shelf life as a main constraint and a network that replenishes daily, the plan is the operation: what Planning commits to is what Procurement buys, what Production builds, what Pick Pack sorts, and what our line hauls, delivery routes, and drivers execute. This role converts a growing commercial demand into a plan the business can actually deliver. You will lead a team of planning leaders across Procurement, Production, Pick Pack, Fulfillment, and a Planning Continuous Improvement Manager. Your immediate mandate is to create a detailed list of supply chain constraints measured against demand and build a roadmap to prioritize and eliminate highest ROI capacity bottlenecks. You will be the single gatekeeper of operational constraints which are rolled up from your domain managers, defended with data, and owned across every planning horizon from day-of execution to three-plus months out, through long term supply planning.

Requirements

8+ years of supply chain or operations planning experience, including 3+ years leading teams; experience managing managers strongly preferred
Demonstrated ownership of a full S&OP cycle, including running the executive S&OP forum, strongly preferred
Labor planning and resource planning/allocation experience across multi-site operations strongly preferred
Network design and capacity modeling experience strongly preferred
Experience building or operating a constraint-based planning model (finite capacity, rough-cut capacity planning, or similar) preferred
Experience balancing both supply and demand to maximize business outcomes (ex revenue, profit)
Prior experience in fresh, perishable, or short-shelf-life food — production, distribution, or both — preferred
Progressive team management experience with a track record of developing planners into planning leaders
Advanced analytical capability: Excel modeling required; SQL, BI tooling, and familiarity with optimization or routing platforms preferred
Comfort operating in ambiguity and building process where none exists today

Responsibilities

Own the full S&OP cycle end to end — demand review, supply review, reconciliation, and executive S&OP — with a fixed cadence, named owners, and a single published plan of record.
Run the process across all planning horizons — day-of, 2–3 days, one week, one month, six weeks, and three-plus months — so that near-term execution and long-range capacity decisions are made off the same set of numbers.
Drive decisions in the S&OP forum. Where demand exceeds capability, surface the options — add capacity, shift mix, re-sequence, or accept the miss — and drive the call to closure.
Partner with Sales, Revenue Operations, Channel, Finance, and Culinary/R&D so that fridge launches and removals, delivery cadence changes, menu changes, and promotional activity are reflected in the plan before they reach the floor.
Serve as the single gatekeeper of operational constraints for the business. No constraint enters the plan without being defined, quantified, owned, and validated.
Roll up constraints from domain managers across the six constraining functions in flow order: Procurement, Production, Pick Pack, Line Hauls, Final Mile Delivery, and Fridge Stocking.
Own the constraint matrix that maps each functional constraint to its relevant planning horizon, with a named owner, a current value, a documented basis of calculation, and a review date.
Hold the line on constraint integrity and challenge padded or stale limits, require the data behind each number, and retire constraints once they have been resolved.
Translate constraints into a plain answer to the question the business actually asks: what can we sell, produce, and stock this week, and what would have to change to do more?
Lead a team of planning managers across multiple domains — Procurement, Production, Pick Pack, and Fulfillment Planning, and Planning Continuous Improvement — and build the bench beneath them.
Set a consistent standard of planning rigor across domains: documented assumptions, versioned models, published outputs, and structured post-mortems on plan-versus-actual misses.
Coach domain managers to own their constraints as business partners to their operating counterparts, not as reporters of numbers handed to them.
Define roles, spans, and career paths as the team scales with the network; hire ahead of the growth curve rather than in reaction to it.
Establish clear escalation paths between Planning and Operations so that day-of deviations are resolved without re-litigating the plan.
Identify the binding constraint in the network at any given time and quantify what it costs the business in unserved demand, service misses, waste, or excess cost.
Maintain a forward view of the next several bottlenecks. Identify the constraints that will bind at 1.5x and 2x current volume along with the lead time required to relieve each one.
Translate bottleneck analysis into capital, headcount, and network recommendations with the business case attached.
Partner with Operations and Finance on capacity investment: plant lines and shifts, pick pack throughput, line haul lanes, delivery fleet, and fridge-level access and servicing capacity.
Support network design and expansion decisions including new markets, hubs and spokes, route density, and fridge placement within modeled capability.
Own labor planning across the planning domains: required versus scheduled headcount by function, shift, and market, with buffer and attrition assumptions made explicit.
Allocate constrained resources including production hours, pick pack capacity, drivers, vehicles, and inventory to their highest-value use when demand exceeds capability, using an agreed and documented prioritization rule.
Ensure production, pick pack, and fulfillment plans reflect real operational limits: shelf life, order cutoffs, cooler and dock capacity and access, line haul departure windows, route density, and site access restrictions.
Partner with Final Mile Delivery on route demand and driver requirements so actual and planned routes align.
Build flex capacity into the plan including temporary labor, overtime, and third-party support and define the trigger points for using it.
Establish the planning system of record and reduce the dependence on standalone spreadsheets as the team and network scale.
Define and own the planning KPI set such as forecast accuracy, plan attainment, constraint accuracy, fill rate, waste, and labor plan variance and review it on a fixed cadence.
Direct the Planning Continuous Improvement Manager toward the highest-leverage process gaps, using Lean and structured problem-solving to address root causes rather than symptoms.
Partner with Analytics and Engineering on the data, modeling, and optimization tooling the planning process depends on, including capacity and routing optimization.