Manager Business Optimization

About UsAs a leading provider of high-quality food and beverage ingredients, we work with farming communities across the globe to grow, source and produce ingredients that are good for consumers, farmers, and the world around us. We supply household food brands and manufacturers worldwide with cocoa, coffee, dairy, nuts and spices ingredients which are often grown on our own farms and estates and sourced from hundreds of thousands of farmers across ~50 countries. Along with our diverse manufacturing and innovation capabilities, this means we can provide ingredients for a range of products, from a plant-based latte mix to an almond based snack bar or a dairy-free ice cream. Making a positive impact on people and planet is a core component of our Purpose, to be the change for good food and a healthy future. With a deep-rooted presence in the countries where our ingredients are grown, we are closer to farmers, enabling better quality, and more reliable, traceable, and transparent supply. And whoever we’re with, whatever we’re doing, we always make it real.

Overview of the roleWork with Procurement and planning teams to optimize the economic and operational performance of the plan-to-produce and source-to-pay processes across multiple food-ingredient manufacturing sites. The role combines demand and production planning, procurement analytics, cost analytics, and the digitalization of both functions — including applied AI and automation. It exists to close the value leakage that sits between planning, buying, and finance, and to engineer it out of the process permanently.

Key ResponsibilitiesDemand & production planning — work alongside the demand and production planners who own the plan: strengthen the statistical forecast baseline for a multi-thousand-SKU portfolio, introduce forecast variance and FVA discipline, improve line-level scheduling logic across blending and packaging capacity, and sharpen MRP shortage, scenario and S&OP analytics.Procurement analytics — equip category buyers with the analysis behind their decisions: vendor pricing and spend visibility, category planning and coverage tooling, BOM-based demand attribution to suppliers, supplier risk classification, and should-cost and make-vs-buy support.Cost & financial analytics — give Finance and Operations a common, trusted view of where value leaks: standard cost roll-up through multi-level BOMs, manufacturing variance analysis (PPV, yield, absorption), margin and working-capital impact of planning policy, SLOB/E&O exposure, and inventory and DIO reporting.Service performance — measure OTIF and fill rate on the customer's own methodology and attribute every miss to a planning, supply or capacity root cause, so the accountable function can act on evidence rather than opinion.Digitalisation & AI — the accountability owned outright: replace manual spreadsheet processes with auditable automated systems, build the planning and procurement decision tools the functions run on, and apply AI to analysis, extraction and workflow automation with defined validation and governance.ERP & planning systems — support the functional process owners through ERP and planning-platform implementation and migration: requirements definition, master data governance, data migration, UAT, cutover and hypercare.Influence & team leadership — direct and quality-assure an offshore analytics team, and earn adoption without direct authority by working through the incumbents in Commercial, Procurement, Manufacturing, IT and Finance who own the processes being improved.

Experience and Qualification Degree in Supply Chain, Engineering, Statistics, Accounting or a related quantitative field.Cost or management accounting qualification (CMA / CIMA / ICMAI or equivalent) held alongside operational supply chain accountability.10+ years spanning all three of demand planning, production planning, and procurement analytics — depth in one or two is not sufficient.3+ years in food, beverage, spice or food-ingredient manufacturing (allergen controls, lot traceability, shelf life).Administrator-level configuration experience on an advanced planning system (DemandCaster strongly preferred), plus hands-on ERP data-level SQL in more than one dialect (Plex and Snowflake strongly preferred).Full-lifecycle ERP or planning-platform implementation as business process owner, through cutover and hypercare.Applied intermittent-demand forecasting (Croston, SBA, TSB, ADI/CV² classification, Forecast Value Add).Proven ability to build and deploy production-grade planning and procurement tools independently — advanced Excel engineering plus browser-based analytics applications. No dedicated developer support in this role.Demonstrated AI-enabled automation in production use, with a stated efficiency or accuracy result and a described validation and governance approach.Multi-site accountability and experience directing an offshore analytics team.Preferred: CPIM / CSCP / CPSM; Python or R; SAP IBP / S4 or Blue Yonder exposure; agricultural commodity or packaging category experience.

First Year Success MeasuresSuccess in year one is evidenced by working systems in daily use and a quantified benefit, not by analysis delivered:Planning — corrected end-to-end capacity model in live use by the planners, and FVA reporting running in the monthly S&OP cycle.Procurement — buyer category console deployed and adopted by the buying team, with coverage and supplier risk visible in one place.Cost & working capital — quantified PPV and working-capital benefit agreed with Finance, and reduced aged SLOB exposure.Service — measurable OTIF and fill-rate improvement on the customer's own methodology, with every miss attributed to a root cause and owner.Digitalisation — phase one of the roadmap delivered, with the manual spreadsheet routines it replaced retired rather than run in parallel.

ofi is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to racial or ethnic origin, color, age, religion or belief, sex, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.