Distribution and Materials Manager

PlayCore helps build stronger communities throughout the world by advancing play and recreation through research, education, and partnerships. Our company infuses this learning into its complete family of brands. PlayCore expresses a strong dedication to its mission and values by developing play and recreation products and programs to meet the unique needs of each community we serve.

PlayCore has an immediate opening for a Distribution and Materials Manager at Ultrasite located in Red Bud, Illinois. The Distribution and Materials Manager supports the Company Mission and Values through handling all raw materials, equipment and other supplies needed for the company.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Maintains optimum inventory levels to ensure on-time deliveries to meet customer requirements while minimizing carrying cost and premium transportation charges.
• Collaborates with Corporate Purchasing team for purchasing leverage, best practice sharing and policy and procedure updates.
• Oversees the purchasing and/or contracting for materials, supplies, equipment, and services for the operation of the Company, in additional to all inventory items. Confers with requesting parties when specific sources are requested. Investigates and solves problems resulting from material shortages, however caused.
• Oversees and ensures proper production control planning and scheduling programs to meet sales forecasts and to balance the level of manpower and machine requirements. Investigates and follows up deviations to the production schedule.
• Establishes and maintains purchasing practices and policies to ensure honest, fair, and ethical relationships with vendors. Keeps informed on legal matters that affect purchasing policies.
• Responsible for continuing programs of exploration for new materials, suppliers, and processes to achieve the best possible quality, reliability, prices, continuity, and delivery.
• Keeps abreast of material pricing trends that affect Company products.
• Ensures that the company standard practices and procedures are followed in connection with all materials department functions.
• Mentors and coaches, a small team of purchasing and planning professionals.
• Implement, manage, and improve all process related to the materials department.
• Set operations performance expectations and capacity review metrics in conjunction with the manufacturing team to improve service levels.
• Develops, coordinates, and executes strategic sourcing initiatives under agreed-upon time frames to improve the supply chain including supplier performance and supplier development.
• Primary person to establish monthly revenue, inventory and capacity requirement forecasts and owner for distribution warehouses performance which includes managing SKU's, proper SKU levels, OTD to Customer and Availability to Ship metrics.
• Implements and improves planning parameters to drive material flow, reduce set-up occurrences and run efficient work order sizes.
• Coordinates with Sourcing and Quality teams to ensure efficiency of the Supply Chain to achieve delivery and quality metrics.
• Responsible for leading Physical Inventory counts and cycle count efforts.
• Manages Prebuild inventory levels and processes.
• Goes through production schedules, expedite any shortages as well as confirm adequate safety stocks and "on-hands" are available both at the suppliers and at the facility.
• Works with the plant to validate material usage and control to ensure consumption of materials includes any breakage, spoilage, or other factors influencing inventory.

• Owns the slow moving and obsolete inventory process facilitating risk communication, write off completion and material disposal.
• Maintains inventory "system" and provides timely reports.
• Other duties as assigned.

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Education and/or Experience

• Requires a bachelor's degree in business or a Management related field.
• Preferably 6+ years of related experience, or a combination of education and experience.
• Industry certification such as CPIM, CPSC, or CPM preferred.
• Working knowledge and or experience with change management systems such as the Toyota Production System or Danaher Business Systems.
• Prior experience with MRP systems including setup, monitoring and maintenance.
• Experience in setting up and working in Lean production environments with a visual pull system.
• Sales & Operations Planning experience including forecasting, inventory planning and capacity evaluation.
• Ultra Play offers a competitive benefits package including health, dental, 401(k), vacation, and holidays. Ultra Play is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

Qualified candidates that wish to apply should do so by submitting a application on the UltraSite company website.