About Wasoko
Wasoko (“people of the market” in Swahili) is transforming communities across Africa by revolutionizing access to essential goods and services. We are East Africa’s biggest digitized retail distribution platform powered by our own in-house logistics network. Tens of thousands of informal retailers across six countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Senegal) use Wasoko to order everyday essential goods and receive working capital financing.

The informal retailers of Africa today are the primary if not the only channel used by consumers to purchase essential goods worth over $600 billion per year. The fragmented infrastructure across large land mass, distributed but diverse population and rather a smaller basket size spend does not yet lend themselves to big basket retail or mass consumer ecommerce. Instead, the informal retail ecosystem is THE channel for building the plumbing for digital and consumer commerce across Africa.

This is Wasoko’s opportunity. Wasoko with its brand, scale and logistics network is best positioned to build the technology-leveraged rails to serve the 1+ billion African consumers through informal retailers. We are building a digital-first operating system for informal retailers, focusing initially on B2B distribution but quickly incorporating a host of other tools and services to help communities across Africa get more for less.

About The Role

The role of the DP manager will mainly focus on providing an accurate demand plan to guide the Business. This position will work directly with OPS, on the operational demand plan by Sku/Brand/Category/Class/Sub-Class in order to align with the company strategy. The role will directly support the Sales & Operations Planning process through the weekly and monthly Demand Planning Meetings. They will work cross functionally with Marketing, Sales, Finance and Procurement to help achieve high forecast accuracy. Providing aggregate and monthly Forecasts that will drive the Supply Chain to meet Sales and Customer Service objectives.

About You

To succeed in this role you must have:

• Strong analytical abilities
• Strong knowledge of demand planning process in FMCG

• Excellent communication and presentation skills

• Detailed oriented and extreme accuracy

• Ability to Multitask, managing several projects at once

• Extensive spreadsheet analysis and strong mathematical abilities

• Ability to lead cross-functionally

• Team Building

Responsibilities:

• Develop the operations forecast for multiple time horizons. Provide guidance to demand planners, in data analysis, to identify forecast adjustments.

• Review historical sales trends, research demand drivers, prepare forecast data and evaluate forecast variances versus actual demand. Provide corrective actions.

• Monitor key forecast metrics with the objective to continuously reduce forecast error.

• Coordinate cross-functional research activities to reconcile significant variances and then refine the forecast to reflect updated Sales and Marketing assumptions.

• Interact with Sales and Marketing to understand demand forecast drivers.

• Utilize a collaborative and consensus approach by working with Sales, Marketing, Finance, Supply Chain and Customer Service to obtain and ensure that current and accurate information is used for demand inputs into the operations forecast.

• Liaison to the Finance Department in updating the Long Range Plan (LRP) assumptions.

• Continuous improvement for demand planning processes and systems.

• Report Key KPI’s and root cause/create plan of action at the SKU level

Role Location: East Africa Countries /West Africa Countries

Requirements:

• 5+ years experience in Demand Planning/Forecasting preferred
• Knowledge of forecasting softwares and SAP systems preferred or other ERP system.

• Proficient in PC skills, especially MS Office, Excel is a must.

• Familiarity with FMCG, especially commodities, perishable products products and key classes of general trade across EAC