Customer Planning Manager

 

CUSTOMER PLANNING MANAGER

Reports to: Director of Planning & S&OP (Operations)

 

ABOUT THE ROLE

You are the operational counterpart to your Account Manager — the person who makes sure every existing account runs flawlessly, so your AM can stay focused entirely on growing it.

 

RESPONSIBILITIES

You mesh two operating systems together — HydroJug's and the customer's. You know HydroJug's supplier lead times, production milestones, warehouse shipping schedules, inventory position, and product launch calendar. You know the customer's planning cycles, floor-date requirements, PO windows, and compliance rules. Your job is to hold those two calendars against each other and manage every gap before it becomes a miss.

 

Lead-time management

You know exactly how long it takes to get product from factory to floor for every SKU your accounts carry. You translate that into commitments the AM can give buyers with confidence. When a supplier runs late or a shipping window shifts, you're the one who figures out the impact and surfaces options — not the AM, and not after the fact.

 

Forward calendar ownership

You maintain the 12-month rolling product and launch calendar for your accounts. What's launching when, what the floor date is, when the PO needs to be placed, when the product ships, when it arrives. This calendar is what you bring to planning meetings. It answers the question buyers always ask: "What does the next 12 months look like?"

 

Planning meeting attendance

You go to planning meetings with your AM. Not as an observer — as the operational expert in the room. When DSG's planning team asks about lead times for the fall launch, you answer. When Walmart wants to know if HJ can hit a specific floor date for a seasonal program, you answer. The AM handles the relationship and the growth conversation; you handle the operational one.

 

PO timing and management

You own the PO placement calendar for your accounts. Retailers have rules about when orders need to be placed to hit their floor dates. You know those rules and you hold HJ to them. A PO placed two weeks late means a floor-date miss — that's your responsibility to prevent.

 

Shipment tracking

When product is leaving the warehouse for your accounts, you know about it before your AM does, and you proactively send the update. Your AM should never have to ask "where is my order?" — they should already know because you told them.

 

In-stock monitoring

You track in-stock rates at your accounts from available retailer data (POS, sell-through, retailer portals). When a SKU is trending toward a stockout, you flag it — to the AM, to Demand Planning, and to Inventory — before the buyer calls.

 

New item launch coordination

When your AM successfully sells in a new product, you own everything that has to happen on the ops side to make that launch actually work: item setup in the retailer's system, EDI setup, supply readiness confirmation, compliance documentation, and shipment timing. The AM wins the business; you close the execution loop.

 

OTIF and fill-rate scorecards

You own the account-level OTIF and fill-rate numbers for your accounts. When they're green, you know why. When they slip, you own root-cause analysis with Sales Operations and bring the AM a clear picture of what happened and what's being done about it.

 

REPORTING & ORGANIZATION

Your AM (daily) — your closest working partner. They need to trust that you have the ops picture completely covered. You brief them before every customer conversation and proactively surface anything that could affect a buyer meeting or a commitment.

 

Director of Planning & S&OP (your manager) — you roll up here. This is where you get the data: demand forecasts, inventory positions, supply plan, production milestones. You translate that data into account-level calendars.

 

Demand Planning team — you route account-level demand signals to them. They own the forecast; you own the customer-facing translation of it.

 

Supply Planning team — you pull from their supplier lead-time data. When a factory milestone slips, you're the first person in Sales to know about it.

 

Inventory team — you track in-stock data per account and flag what you see to inventory.

 

Warehouse — you track when product ships and route that information to your AM. You coordinate closely on bulk orders and custom programs.

 

Sales Operations — your partner on EDI, item setup, compliance, and chargeback root-cause.

 

eCommerce Manager — Wholesale — for accounts where retailer dot-com content matters, you coordinate with them on launch timing.

 

SUCCESS CRITERIA

First 30 days

• 1:1s with your AM, the Director of Planning & S&OP, Demand Planning leads, Supply Planning leads, Warehouse, and Sales Operations.
• You've mapped the current state of every account you own: what's ordered, what's in transit, what's launching, where the risk is.
• You've introduced yourself to the retailer planning teams you'll be working with.

 

First 90 days

• Your 12-month forward calendar for each account is built and current.
• Your AM gets a weekly ops brief from you. They stop having to track down information themselves.
• You've attended at least one planning meeting with your AM for each account.
• PO placement is running on a forward cadence — nothing is being placed last-minute.

 

First 6 months

• OTIF is at target for every account you own.
• Your AM is saying "I never have to worry about ops" — and meaning it.
• You've caught at least one major issue (supply constraint, floor-date risk, stockout trend) before it became a problem.
• You know the planning cadence of every retailer in your portfolio by heart.

 

First 12 months

• Your accounts have zero ops-driven floor-date misses.
• Your AM is spending 100% of their time on growth because ops is completely off their plate.
• The buyers at your accounts know you by name and trust that when HJ makes an operational commitment, you're the person who backs it up.
• You've built enough cross-functional trust internally (Demand Planning, Supply Planning, Inventory, Warehouse) that you can get fast answers when a retailer needs them.

 

QUALIFICATIONS

Background:

• 3–7 years in supply chain, customer planning, retail operations, or account operations at a $100M–$500M consumer brand
• Has worked directly with wholesale retailers — understands how major accounts (Target, Walmart, DSG, etc.) plan, order, and operate
• Fluent in retailer planning cycles — knows what OTIF means, what a vendor scorecard looks like, what a fill-rate conversation sounds like
• Comfortable translating supplier/factory lead-time data into customer-facing commitments
• Strong at data + operational calendaring — Excel / Google Sheets as a baseline; ERP and retailer portal experience (RetailLink, POL, etc.) a strong plus

 

Soft profile:

• Proactive by default — you don't wait for the problem to surface. You find it before it surfaces.
• Clear communicator — you can take a complex supply chain situation and explain it in two sentences to a buyer.
• High ownership — if an account misses OTIF, you own finding out why and making sure it doesn't happen again.
• Collaborative — you work across Operations, Sales, Warehouse, and Demand Planning all day. You can't afford friction.
• Comfortable in customer meetings — you're not the lead in the room, but you're not a wallflower either. Buyers will ask you direct ops questions; you answer them clearly and confidently.

 

REPORTING & ORGANIZATION

Each Customer Planning Manager is paired 1:1 with a specific Account Manager and covers that AM's account portfolio. The accounts you'll own depend on which seat you're filling:

 

• Big Box: Target · Walmart (paired with CJ Krewson, VP of Sales)
• Grocery, Dept Stores & International: Grocery + Dept Stores + International accounts (paired with Shane Kirk, Sr. NAM)
• Sporting Goods: DSG · Scheels · Academy (paired with Jordan Turley, Director Sporting Goods)
• Key Accounts & Wholesale Portal: Key Accounts + ma-and-pa portal accounts (paired with Anna Doman, Sr. Account Manager)
• Corporate: Corporate + Large Enterprise B2B (paired with Mike Rios, Account Manager — Corporate)

 

The operational discipline — lead-time management, forward calendaring, PO timing, shipment tracking, in-stock monitoring — is identical across all five seats. The retailer-specific knowledge (which portals, which compliance rules, which planning cadence) varies by seat.

 

ABOUT HYDROJUG, INC.

HydroJug, Inc. is a consumer brand headquartered in Ogden, Utah, designing and selling premium hydration and lifestyle products through direct-to-consumer and major retail channels.

 

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Featured benefits

Medical insurance, Vision insurance, Dental insurance, 401(k)