Ehsan Jafari

Collaborative Planning. Forecasting and replenishment

(CPFR) Customers: Microsoft, Meta, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom

• My role includes customer facing function that involves direct interaction with top tier customers where I fulfill their requirements. I engage with them to understand their demand for upcoming 6-9month and provide optimal lead time guidance to ensure they have seamless deployment and project roll out.
• Clearing prioritized orders for regional needs with support of manufacturing team and considering operating plan.
• Actively creating What If scenarios and identifying key customer impact and mitigation strategies
• Developing front-end demand management capabilities: Closely working with Sales plan and proactively shaping demand based on my judge – mix decision and E&O reduction
• Optimizing VWOS (Virtual Weeks of Supply) bookings recommendation methodology by incorporating time-phased safety stock and lead-times.

My cross functional responsibilities:

• Coaching cross-functional leaders on the 3 levers of Inventory Management and sharing standard methodologies to drive improvements in working capital.
• Working across groups and divisions to help with prioritization and trade-off decisions around service levels targets to stable vs growth markets.
• Evaluating 3PL performance against orders and SLA’s.
• Developing compelling presentations and effectively communicate findings on key trends, insights, and implications while aligning stakeholders against specific action plans Collaborating in the New Product Introduction (NPI) process (pricing strategy, sales BOM, manufacturing, distribution, end of sale), collaborating with sales team regarding customers and reseller’s contract negotiation in terms of supply.

Forecasting:

• Forecast accuracy maintenance: 88% Avg Forecast Bias: +/-3% Avg
• My role consisted of demand planning by using appropriate statistical models and incorporating business intelligence and forecast information from sales, marketing, finance and other sources. Submitted single volume projections for manufacturing in actual cases to be used for the material planning schedule, rough cut capacity planning and inventory planning. Responsible for balancing and deep analysis to reconcile units forecast into dollar forecast to capture financial dynamics into kits/unit forecast and support growth trend of future.

Inventory planning:

• Monthly DC Inv value maintenance $110M Field Inv maintenance: $15M
• Maintained optimum inventory levels to cover safety stock targets and weekly kits coverage in assigned countries to guarantee agreed service level with minimizing obsolescence risks. Scrap rate/revenue ratio 1.7%
• Designed a platform where kits of medical device with full sized is shipped to hospitals and returned within specific period to hit 100% service level, created platform supported sales to gain market share of 11% month over a month.

Reporting:

• Coordinating three S&OP meetings within a month- Avg Participation rate 95%
• Monthly SI&OP for Clusters: held SI&OP meeting with focus of forecast integration and reconciliation into dollar value and aligning with financial targets in monthly, quarterly, and annual buckets.
• Monthly SI&OP for EMEA market: Held SI&OP meeting with focus of forecast integration and reconciliation into dollar value at EMEA level and aligning with EMEA budget. Covering market dedicated topics such product lunch and discontinuation, month to date, year to date KPI review such as revenue, inventory level, forecast accuracy, inventory charges (Reserve, excess and scrap).
• Monthly distribution center S&OP: led a meeting fed by material including recent forecast changes, reconciling forecast into cubic sizes and potential capacity requirement based on monthly business dynamics

• Maintained 24 Month statistical forecast for 120 product family and 12 Month override forecast for 50 products family for established market. 94% Accuracy with help of optimizing forecast models
• Created VBA based tool to Calculate Desired Build Plan (DBP) for EMEA in a short cycle after forecast for all product in the portfolio.
• Reviewed DBP versus Committed Build plan (CBP) with production planners to understand shortages and backorders.
• Communicated inventory recovery projection in a weekly cadence with qualitative information on resolution effort.
• Expediting shipments from Tier1 distribution center into Tier2 distribution center and reduced in-transit days by ,30% to hits OTIF targets.
• Led Excess, Expiry, Obsolescence (EE&O) exercise and reduced inventory charges for short, dated products with collaborating commercial team. 45%reduction in obsolescence, 15% reduction in inventory value without risk to service.
• Ran VIP program which reduced working capital by 3.8%.

• Managed and implemented specific planning strategies, procedures which optimize cost, delivery and service while ensuring continued supply.

• Communicate to Senior Management & Financial Controllers any significant variances between Financial and Marketing rolling forecast and drive consensus to agree on the forecast.

• Initiated several improvement projects that contribute to the continuous improvement of Supply chain performance such as JDA roll out – extending the use of statistical forecast across countries Consensus across Commercial, Finance and Supply chain – Forecast, Financial provision, Backorders.

• Prioritization tool for manufacturing – supporting manufacturing with clear priorities to improve capacity utilization and OTIF