Inventory & Production Planner

Location: Belgium // Antwerp

Kontoor Brands is a global lifestyle apparel company, with a portfolio of some of the world’s most iconic denim brands: Wrangler®and Lee®. We design, manufacture and distribute superior high-quality products that look good and fit right, giving people around the world the freedom and confidence to express themselves.

Kontoor’s European Headquarters in Antwerp, Belgium hosts 23 different nationalities, representing a unique blend of cultures. Our global community of more than 15,000 employees fosters a culture of collaboration, performance and entrepreneurial spirit. We are looking for inclusive, creative and forward-looking employees with a passion for creating innovative apparel products and accessories.

What’s the scope?

As our Inventory & Supply Planneryou will be responsible to monitor and align the incoming demand with the available vendor production capacity and constraints. This in order to provide an excellent service towards our internal and external customers, by focusing on timely and complete deliveries and by minimizing the risk of creating leftover inventory. He/she also needs to check allocation and availability for key-account orders working closely together with the allocation and customer priority team in order to define when orders can be booked or released in view of achieving the financials.

As our Inventory & Supply Planneryou will;

• Pre-season setup : Define production and availability parameters based on the targets/input given by the Inventory and Supply manager.
• Linecleaning/Linereviews : Prepare the production part and review the collection with the Merchandising/Sales Operations/forecasting and Sourcing team in order to define availability , status , ship modes , upcharges and non-production
• Vendor management : Agree on general capacity and constraints with the vendors, considering their input and output capacity. Follow up deliveries, both towards timing and order completion. Agree and verify with vendors on fabric & trim liabilities.
• Weekly production planning : Setup and review production planning by fabric, driven by pre-defined parameters. Review with the APAR team , Product Development and Merchandising team the ongoing collaborations and flash collections.
• Production order management : Give vendors the go-ahead to order fabrics. Size, re-size, split or hold production orders in order to achieve the inventory and service targets. Define quantities to be scheduled separately for UK in view of duties optimalization
• Inventory management : Evaluate and communicate if products need to be dropped from the collection, are ‘sold out’ or if the availability needs to be moved to a later date. Update a weekly ‘on hold’ report and initiate action to remediate production or delivery issues.
• Communication & feedback : prepare the operations meetings and give feedback during the meeting to sourcing and merchandising team
• Ad hoc reporting : Prepare efficiency files, PO difference reports, etc..
• Support the further development and optimize the working of the new planning module logility and get a clear view of the impact of the planning system on the overall availability and atp calculation in S4/MM/ B2B …
• Follow up on production and shipments : being able to track scheduled PO’s out of logility in to S4 , release from these PO’s in to NGC and data flow from NGC to GT nexus. Being able to identify possible issues in NGC and impact on logility , shipments and PO in take working closely together with logistics and DC.
• Support new projects both EMEA as global ones : example how can we again automate the PO updates ( quantities+ CRD’s ) in S4 by using NGC data , factory release data and info out of GT Nexus.

Skills for Success:

• We are looking for a starter with a University Degree (Applied Economics, Economics, Commercial Engineer) or someone with experience in supply chain , operations or logistics
• Excellent planning , analytical and organizational skills are a must
• Good and professional communication skills
• Teamplayer
• Flexibility and ability to deal with deadlines
• Good knowledge of MS Office (esp. Excel) , SAP , logility , NGC , GT Nexus are a plus
• Fluent in English

We offer:

We value trust and transparency and focus on collaboration and teamwork. We live by our clear Purpose, Mission & Values where we strive for continuous innovation & cutting-edge sustainable technology.

We offer competitive benefits, perks and personal development opportunities;

• Attractive salary package;
• Discount on our brands; Wrangler® & Lee®;
• Casual Denim dress code in the office and outside of work;
• Multi-cultural, diverse and inclusive workforce where we foster many different nationalities;
• Employee resource groups focusing on diversity, sustainability, wellbeing and social activities;
• Development opportunities in a growth-driven environment;
• Benefits of a global company.