Background & Purpose of the Job

This role supports the North America Supply Chain Ice Cream business, located in Englewood Cliffs. The NA Ice Cream Category is $3 Billion in annual sales and growing! This person is an important player for the category since they will develop the long-term Supply Chain strategies to create value for the category within the existing and future portfolio, then lead execution on those sourcing changes. 

The Associate Manager-Strategic Planning will lead portfolio and project management, ideation, and project execution of various project types across Supply Chain. They will also support developing sound business cases to support category growth, savings delivery and service improvement following the USLP principles and ensuring the optimal E2E network design. In addition, they will perform long term capacity planning, evaluate network constraints, identify improvement opportunities, review capex and technology needs, lead savings identification and implementation, complexity reduction initiatives, and strategic project scoping and execution—all towards driving Gross Margin and profit improvement. This role will not only simulate and optimize current network but continually look for step change opportunities within the end-to-end supply chain. 

This person will closely interact with Brand, Supply/Demand Planning, Factories, Finance, Procurement and R&D to deliver the category business targets. They will also lead the charge on supply chain savings initiatives with the senior stakeholders in category leadership forums and across the supply chain.

This role will business partner with Brand, Supply/Demand Planning, Factories, Finance, Procurement and R&D to deliver their projects and analysis.

Who You Are & What You’ll Do:

• You’re a strategy guru: You not only understand what the sourcing network needs to be today, but more importantly what needs to be done tomorrow.  You can balance multiple tradeoffs and priorities within projects to arrive at the best solution.
• You’re a dot connector: You can see the impact of project and process choices on down-stream and up-stream activities in the end-to-end supply chain.
• You love to win and have fun doing it: We make big choices on investments and capital that have impact for years down the road. You must be bold in the recommendations, always working with a win-win mind-set in the face of setbacks. 
• You’re a changemaker: Some of the things that work today, will not work in the future. You are often the first tackle change and will need to bring others along the journey.

Key Responsibilities

• Brainstorm, develop, and lead project ideas, including business case analysis, defining capex, and cost savings for project execution. 
• Monitor the progress on the achievement of the category KPIs in Gross Margin, service, working capital, supply chain material costs, etc. 
• Perform capacity modeling for supply chain network (supply, materials, etc.) using optimization and analytical techniques 
• Support complexity reduction in product portfolio and overall network 
• Drive portions of the 5S agenda by leading all product logic projects: project delivery, coordination of ideation sessions, and strong stakeholder management.  

• Includes reporting out at category leadership forums to senior stakeholders (CCBT) and leading cross-functional brainstorming sessions with the category teams locally and globally. 

What You’ll Need to Succeed

Required

• Bachelor’s Degree in a related field
• Project management experience
• 3 or more years combined experience in any of the following areas: Supply Chain planning, Manufacturing, Logistics, Engineering, R&D and/or Operations Research
• Clear demonstration of leadership, team commitment and influencing others without authority
• Cross functional and business process, commercial and financial Acumen
• Communication abilities to all levels of the organization

Preferred

• Innovation management and/or Project Management Professional (PMP) license
• MS Project basic knowledge
• Cross functional business process, commercial, and financial acumen
• Strong presentation and public speaking capabilities
• Strong Excel and data analytics capabilities

What We Can Offer You

Culture for Growth | Top Notch Employee Health & Well Being Benefits | Every Voice Matters | Global Reach | Unilever: Life | LinkedIn | Strategy | Unilever | Why work for Unilever | Careers at Unilever |  Unilever Global Website | Check Out Our Space

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Unilever is an organization committed to diversity and inclusion to drive our business results and create a better future every day for our diverse employees, global consumers, partners, and communities. We believe a diverse workforce allows us to match our growth ambitions and drive inclusion across the business. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability. 

Employment is subject to verification of pre-screening tests, which may include drug screening, background check, credit check and DMV check.

If you are an individual with a disability in need of assistance at any time during our recruitment process, please contact us at NA.Accommodations@unilever.com. Please note: This email is reserved for individuals with disabilities in need of assistance and is not a means of inquiry about positions or application statuses.