Solution Owner Demand

Within Mars’ (Planning) Center of Excellence (CoE), you can help drive a human-centric digital planning transformation by continuously improving planning systems and their user interfaces.

FIT for YOU?

• Enthused to boost your teams journey with your digital skills?
• Inspired to be part of the team that digitally reimagines the way we work at Mars?
• Want to practice your digital muscle and ability to engage others on the journey?

Mars is setting up the Centre of Excellence, the driving force of a human centric digital planning transformation. Want to be part of this uplifting transformation by driving the continuous improvement of systems and their UI’s in the planning teams?

Context & the team

In this rapidly changing world, an agile supply chain (SC) makes the difference for our customer and consumers. Mars believes that a human centric and digitally connected planning team is key to unlock this as it is the glue for ONE end to end SC team. With “enterprise planning” Mars is initiating this new planning team creating a whole new organizational structure, future fit planning capabilities & processes and underlying best in class systems. It transforms the way Mars SC works: more connected, transparent, faster, agile, customer focused and digital.

The (Planning) Center of Excellence -CoE- sits at the heart of this transformation. It can be seen as a digital catalyst to speed up and strengthen the planning transformation. The team services both the European and the Russian sourcing circle. It will operate by the principals of: full transparency of processes and data, planning by exception and continuous improvement of people processes and systems. In practice this means a build-measure-learn approach that is implemented through:

• monitor (adopted) planning ways of working,
• provide action driven insights to the business
• identify best practices internal and external,
• build new capabilities, processes, tools and dashboards,
• create a machine driven forecast as a common point of reference
• store and retrieve the right data with appropriate quality checks
• provide training for tools and ways of working

As this transforms the way of working in Mars the CoE is looking to create a strong dynamic team of digital savvy and content heavy change agents. We will share the common passion to bring the benefits of a digital way of working to the people in the (planning) operation all around Europe for their own benefit and that of customers / consumers.

The role

Within the CoE team the Solution Owner report to the Operational Excellence lead. The Solution Owner is responsible to ensure the systems are fit for purpose, well understood and both systems and users continuously develop to the evolving best practices in the planning teams. Even though the solutions owner will have knowledge across the system landscape used in planning the two key systems are the advanced planning tools E2Open and Kinaxis.

The solution owners will closely coorperate with the process stewards in the team and the corporate DT team (IT development). In this they play a crucial to make new tools and future enhancement a success by clarifying the business needs using design thinking, translating business needs into system requirements, support the agile tool development from a business user perspective and deploy the tool and the needed training in the business afterwards. The aim is to make Mars associates as enthused about their tools as the apps on their smartphone.

Key Responsibilities

• Ensuring the software capabilities are leveraged to best support of the business.
• Being the super user of those tools and the main point of contact for those
• Drives digital mindset within the E2E Planning team through a great user experience and expertise across the teams.
• Act as a focal point for the E2E planning team for software related questions and training. This should include all training needs and standard documentation
• Collect and prioritize user feedback and ideas for improvement on UI, data availability and automation.
• Acts as the point of escalation for software users and work on solution to ensure uptime, data integrity and user experience.
• Build a vision and implementation plan for making process status and key information digitally accessible for all planning teams.
• Work with software vendors to keep abreast of future enhancements or trigger them in line with the vision and bring them to the attention of the process stewards and E2E Planning leadership team
• Ensuring updates are installed and thoroughly tested in partnership with the Process Stewards
• Consulting management regarding additional capabilities or concept changes
• Work closely with the Digital technology organisation to assess new capabilities and related new tools.

Experience / Background

Education and Professional

• B.S. or BA computer science, supply chain management, engineering and/or natural sciences. Master or advanced degree (sciences and/or math) preferred
• 5-8 years of supply chain management and planning experience for a global or multi-plant CPG/FMCG company

Knowledge / Experience

• Experienced with change management and technology adoption
• Experience in Supply Chain Management, certification in Production and Inventory Management will be a plus (APICS)
• Experience of Advanced Planning Systems (APS) (Kinaxis Rapid Response)
• Experience with managing and administrating software solutions for large teams
• Understanding of agile development methodology and continuous improvement
• Understanding of database system and data transformation preferred planning data
• Ability to listen to others and link to others’ ideas
• Understanding of data structures (SQL, Azure)
• Understanding of data model and supply chain data structure incl. master data, transactional data and external unstructured data
• Fluent in English

#TBdigital