Manager, Demand Planner

Oatly AB • Village of Highland Falls, NY

6d • Hybrid

About The Position

Oatly, an established oatmilk company originating in Sweden, is seeking a Manager, Demand Planning for its North America operations. The company values sustainability, health, and transparency, aiming to improve the food system by promoting oat-based products and reducing cow's milk consumption. The Manager, Demand Planning will lead the North America Demand Planning function, responsible for developing a consensus-based demand plan that supports business growth, service excellence, inventory optimization, and profitable decision-making. This role oversees the end-to-end demand planning process for a 12-48 month horizon and is a key leadership position within the company’s Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process. The Manager acts as a liaison between Commercial, Finance, Supply Chain, Portfolio, and Operations teams, ensuring market intelligence, commercial assumptions, and statistical forecasts are integrated into a realistic and actionable demand plan. The position involves leading a team of Demand Planners, improving forecast performance, facilitating commercial reviews, and developing scenario-based recommendations for executive decision-making.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain, Business, Economics, Engineering, or a related field
• 5+ years of Demand Planning, IBP, S&OP or Commercial Planning
• 3+ years of people leadership experience
• Proven experience leading demand planning processes in FMCG, food & beverage, consumer goods, or other fast-moving industries
• Demonstrated success driving cross-functional alignment and influencing senior stakeholders
• Experience supporting executive-level decision-making through analytics and scenario planning
• Experience with planning platforms such as Anaplan, SAP IBP, OMP, Kinaxis, or equivalent with strong BI utilization & Excel capabilities
• Excellent communication skills, verbal and written
• Ability to travel 25%

Nice To Haves

• You feel connected to our mission of encouraging health, sustainability, and transparency
• You are a self-starter who doesn’t need direct supervision to motivate you for success – we believe strongly in building a culture of individual accountability and ownership and need partners that can embrace that mentality
• You are ready to make your mark in a smaller, growing brand, leveraging your experience to deliver amazing results and build an outstanding company
• You have an entrepreneurial spirit in that you’re comfortable with ambiguity and are energized by the process of building something lasting from the ground up
• You enjoy sharing your quirkiness and talents with your coworkers

Responsibilities

• Lead the North America Demand Planning team and establish a high-performing, data-driven planning organization
• Own the development and maintenance of the regional demand plan across all channels, customers, and product categories
• Ensure demand plans reflect commercial strategies, promotional activities, customer developments, portfolio initiatives, and market intelligence
• Create a culture of accountability, collaboration, continuous improvement, and analytical excellence throughout the commercial & demand planning team
• Lead the development of statistical and judgmental forecasting methodologies
• Monitor and improve Forecast Accuracy, Forecast Bias, and forecast value-add metrics
• Utilize advanced analytics, market data, customer insights, and business intelligence tools to identify trends and risks
• Develop scenario planning capabilities to evaluate the impact of market changes, supply constraints, customer actions, product launches, and promotional activities
• Drive root cause analyses to continuously improve forecast performance and business decision quality
• Lead the Demand Review process as part of the monthly IBP cycle
• Facilitate cross-functional consensus planning discussions with Commercial, Finance, Supply Planning, and Portfolio teams
• Translate market assumptions into a credible demand outlook covering volume, revenue, and margin expectations
• Identify demand risks and opportunities and proactively develop mitigation and gap-closing plans
• Present demand insights, scenarios, and recommendations to senior leadership teams
• Challenge assumptions where appropriate to ensure a realistic and unbiased forecast
• Work closely with regional IBP Lead to drive alignment between the demand plan, financial outlook, and supply capabilities
• Champion continuous improvement of forecasting processes, planning governance, and planning capabilities
• Drive adoption and optimization of planning technologies including Anaplan, Power BI, AI forecasting, and advanced planning tools
• Improve data quality, planning parameter governance, and reporting automation
• Lead initiatives that strengthen planning maturity and support the long-term IBP roadmap
• Work actively on coaching, mentorship, and developing Demand Planners in accordance with Oatly´s High-Performing team culture & mentality
• Establish clear performance expectations and development plans
• Strengthening planning capabilities through training, best-practice sharing, and continuous learning
• Build succession plans and future planning capabilities across the North American organization

Benefits

• flexible vacation (take it when you need it)
• really great benefits
• pet insurance
• paid volunteer days off throughout the year
• free six packs of oatmilk
• genuinely great coworkers who are rooting for each other and the company to thrive

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager