You can learn more about a company from its job postings than from its annual report. The report is polished. The posting is a list of what is currently broken. Lately, one broken thing keeps showing up in the ones for planners.
A company's marketing tells you how it wants to be seen. Its hiring tells you what is actually going wrong, because you only write a job description once a problem has grown big enough to need a full-time person aimed at it. Which is why the ones for Buyers and Planners are worth reading closely right now.
Flip through a stack of current Buyer and Planner postings and you keep hitting the same sentence, dressed a little differently each time. Reduce excess, obsolete and slow-moving inventory. Bring down days on hand. Adjust forecasts, safety stocks and reorder points. Expedite, defer or cancel purchase orders as demand moves. CPIM a plus. Clear away the HR polish and the company is admitting one thing: we are holding stock we should not be holding, and we need someone to make it disappear.
It is good that it gets named. The catch is the quiet assumption underneath it, that the pile is a staffing problem, that it built up because nobody had the time or the mandate to manage it down, and that the right hire with the right certificate will clear it out. Sometimes that is part of the story. Usually it is not the real one.
The pile is rarely there because nobody was watching. It is there because the planners did not trust the numbers they were handed, so they protected themselves. When a forecast gives a different answer every time you run it, and no one can explain why the system is asking for 4,200 units this month, a good planner does the sane thing: pads the safety stock and overrides the system. Do that across a few thousand SKUs, month after month, and you have built the exact pile the new posting is now asking someone to clean up.
So the new planner walks in on day one and inherits all of it. The aged stock. The finance director who stopped believing the forecast a long time ago. And the forecast itself, still as shaky as ever. The first year goes to doing by hand what a method should have been doing quietly in the background: chasing slow movers, haggling markdowns, killing orders that should never have been placed. They will make real progress. And the pile will refill behind them, because the thing that produced it is still running, untouched.
A good planner is worth a great deal sitting on top of a forecast they can stand behind, and very little standing in front of one they have to argue with. Hand them a number that comes out the same every time it runs, traceable from the headline down to its pieces, and the whole job changes. They stop defending the system to finance and start acting on it. The excess does not creep back, because it was never short staffing. It was a trust problem dressed up as one.
None of this means do not hire planners. The good ones are rare and worth every dollar. But a person cannot paper over a method. Before you write "reduce excess and obsolete inventory" into your next posting, the question worth sitting with is why the stock became excess in the first place, and whether the forecast that ordered it can be rerun and explained. Answer that, and your new planner has a real shot. Skip it, and you have just put the override problem on payroll.
Hire a planner on top of a forecast nobody trusts, and you have not cleared the pile. You have put the override problem on payroll.
Picture your next S&OP meeting: one number on screen that nobody argues with. See it free, on your own data, in 45 minutes; and if it does not hold up, we part as friends.