Supply Chain Planning Engineer

Caterpillar•Peoria, IL

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Your Work Shapes the World at Caterpillar Inc. When you join Caterpillar, you're joining a global team who cares not just about the work we do – but also about each other. We are the makers, problem solvers, and future world builders who are creating stronger, more sustainable communities. We don't just talk about progress and innovation here – we make it happen, with our customers, where we work and live. Together, we are building a better world, so we can all enjoy living in it. The Supply Chain Planning Engineer will lead and support the deployment and embedding of the enterprise Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) process, solutions, and standard work by partnering closely with facility supply chain, product groups, procurement, and digital teams. In this role, you will build a strong understanding of the supply network and leverage digital planning solutions to improve data quality, enable effective capacity planning, and strengthen synchronization across the end‑to‑end supply chain. What makes this role exciting: This role plays a critical part in establishing and maturing capacity planning capabilities across facilities, directly enabling stronger enterprise‑level planning and decision‑making. The work does not stop at building capacity plans. The insights you provide flow into the broader S&OP process, helping the enterprise proactively understand the impact of capacity constraints on the machine business before they become execution issues. This role adds significant value during periods of ramp‑up and change by improving visibility, enabling earlier trade‑off decisions, and helping leaders act with confidence in a dynamic, high‑velocity environment.

Requirements

Analytical Thinking: Extensive knowledge of techniques and tools that promote effective analysis; ability to determine the root cause of organizational problems and create alternative solutions that resolve these problems. Seeks discrepancies and inconsistencies in available information; explains variances. Organizes and prioritizes the sequence of steps to be taken to remedy the situation. Identifies many possible causes for a problem based on prior experience and current research. Approaches a complex problem by breaking it down into its component parts. Chooses among a diverse set of analytical tools according to the nature of the situation.
Decision Making and Critical Thinking: Extensive knowledge of the decision-making process and associated tools and techniques; ability to accurately analyze situations and reach productive decisions based on informed judgment. Applies an assigned technique for critical thinking in a decision-making process. Identifies, obtains, and organizes relevant data and ideas. Participates in documenting data, ideas, players, stakeholders, and processes. Recognizes, clarifies, and prioritizes concerns. Assists in assessing risks, benefits and consideration of alternatives.
Project Management: Extensive knowledge of effective project management strategies and tactics; ability to plan, organize, monitor, and control projects, ensuring efficient utilization of technical and administrative resources to achieve project objectives. Plans, estimates, organizes and monitors significant projects. Identifies risks and vulnerabilities; creates contingency plans. Conducts regular and ad-hoc project reviews with project team, sponsors, and internal business partners. Maintains open communication among project participants and interested parties. Communicates reporting requirements; creates monitoring and control mechanisms.
Business Process Improvement: Extensive Knowledge of business process improvement best practices and ability to use methods for identifying, evaluating, introducing and implementing more efficient approaches to performing business related activities. Examines existing business and supply chain processes to identify inefficiencies, variation, waste, or performance gaps. Maps current-state and future-state processes to clearly illustrate problems, opportunities, and improvement pathways. Applies structured improvement methodologies to evaluate alternatives and recommend optimized process solutions. Assesses change impacts, risks, and dependencies to support successful implementation and adoption of improved processes. Partners cross-functionally to introduce standardized work, metrics, and controls that sustain performance improvements.
Problem Solving: Extensive Knowledge of approaches, tools, techniques for recognizing, anticipating, and resolving organizational, operational or process problems; ability to apply knowledge of problem solving appropriately to diverse situations. Identifies and clearly defines complex operational or planning problems using data, facts, and stakeholder input. Selects and applies appropriate problem-solving tools and techniques based on the nature, scope, and impact of the issue. Analyzes multiple potential root causes and evaluates alternative solutions to determine the most effective resolution. Anticipates downstream impacts and risks associated with proposed solutions and adjusts recommendations accordingly. Drives resolution by coordinating stakeholders, monitoring outcomes, and capturing lessons learned to prevent recurrence.
Cross-Team Integration: Working understanding of the importance of inter-team collaboration in breaking down silos and achieving business results; ability to lead employees from various functions to communicate, coordinate work across divisions, and collaborate in solving problems as one team. Maintains a strong internal network that promotes informal collaboration. Shares information that may be relevant to other teams across divisions. Assesses the potential synergies from combining common practices across teams. Identifies differences among teams that could cause barriers to effective integration. Applies relevant information gathered from comparable teams to own team.
Effectiveness Measurement: Working knowledge of effective measurement techniques and ability to measure the quality and quantity of work effort for the purpose of improvement. Under guidance, reports measurement results in actionable form to management. Interprets and analyzes results vs. established benchmarks. Establishes short-range and long-range improvement goals for own function. Under guidance, develops action plans to achieve those goals.
Standard Operating Procedures: Working knowledge of established standard operating procedures (SOP); ability to design, implement and evaluate standard operating procedures affecting daily and strategic business operations in order to increase operational efficiency. Adjusts SOPs according to changes in organizational and industry procedures. Tracks deviations from and modifications to existing SOPs in business operations. Assists in establishing a standard operating procedure based on workflow. Reviews the efficiency of standard operating procedures in terms of performance improvement.
Supply Chain Management - MFG: Working knowledge of functions, principles and techniques used in supply chain management; ability to develop and use, strategies, practices and tools for controlling the logistical processes. Recognizes software systems or components used to manage supply chain. Summarizes supply chain considerations for different types of products or components. Participates in supply chain analysis and uses it to spot trends and improvement opportunities.
Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, including the ability to interact across all levels of the organization from team members to procurement and operations VPs are required.
The work environment requires this position to adapt quickly to high velocity and change.
Project and program management, including communication and change management planning are also required.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Supply Chain, Business Management or similar discipline.
A background in Supply Chain, Manufacturing / Operations, Manufacturing Engineering, Inventory Management, Material Requirements Planning, Demand Management and/or Logistics is highly desired.
Working knowledge and understanding of Caterpillar’s supply network, Lean concept, 6 Sigma methodology.
Superior analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to creatively solve very complex problems.
Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Excel (formulas, equations, macros, VLookup).
Be digital minded, to understand and leverage the underlying technologies / digital solutions to drive business process transformation.
This position requires strong collaborative and interpersonal skills working with people from different backgrounds and cultures, internally and externally, and the ability to influence and resolve differences and issues.

Responsibilities

Collaborate with procurement vertical leads, digital product owners, facility supply chain teams and S&OP coordinators in the product groups to establish, follow, and drive the standard work and workflows.
Understand Caterpillar demand requirements for internal and external suppliers and ensure the data in the NPE – Supply Planning pass all the quality checks.
Understand and identify supply capability and constraints in the network and ensure the data is recorded in the NPE – Supply Planning after passing all the quality checks.
Onboard rough cut capacity planning process (RCCP) for internal supply nodes into NPE – Capacity Collaboration and NPE – Supply Planning.
Facilitate the discussions on supply constraints and build impacts, within the procurement review on workday 20.
Facilitate the discussions on supply constraints and build impacts with the S&OP coordinators / Value Chain Managers on workday 2.
Track & report on the metrics and any improvement plans, to the senior leaders in procurement and operations.
Develop S&OP processes to support the demand or supply planning initiatives for enterprise Machine S&OP group.
Provide leadership to solution development and implementation to any workflow or standard work enhancements identified for continuous improvements within Machine S&OP group.