What does a Material Planner do?
Material planners manage the logistics of materials and inventory during projects. They receive project plans and information from other departments to determine the needed materials. Material planners ensure the company never runs out of necessary manufacturing materials by surveying inventory. They inspect production lines to ensure an adequate supply without over-ordering or wasting products. They monitor materials flow to identify bottlenecks, forecast potential problems and observe trends and customer requests to create and maintain inventory schedules.
Material planners organize and schedule customer deliveries and track production volume in purchasing expectations to ensure the correct number of products and manufacturing materials is always available. They sometimes process customer shipment inquiries or complaints and schedule changes or cancellations for orders. They act as liaisons between manufacturing and other departments and receive project plans and additional information to determine timelines and necessary materials. Material planners need a bachelor's degree in business, logistics, engineering, or supply chain management.
- Responsible to develop, manage and control all aspects of planning for maintenance work.
- Review all completed work orders and ensure items requiring follow up are acted on appropriately and assist in tracking these actions to completion.
- Secure and analyze quotations and recommends suppliers with respect to cost, quality and delivery competitiveness for assigned responsibilities.
- Assist with maintenance, and organization of the plant's technical library ensuring all technical manuals are readily available when needed.
- Attend priority and planning meetings, outage coordination meetings and schedule review meeting and be prepared to actively participate as required.
- Review, determine, and maintain inventory at levels to support company goals while maintain, a high level of customer service and eliminate production downtime.
- Manage products responsibility in rationalization or change activities to deplete finished goods, raw materials, and related assemblies.
- Develop and maintain supplier relationships that result in on time delivery and fast recovery times with effective communication of new delivery times from supplier to internal team when supply issues do arise.
- Support and execute purchasing activities for contracts with suppliers.
- Bachelor's Degree in business or engineering.
- Extensive experience with enterprise resource planning tools and programs.
- Experienced working with statistics and root cause analysis.
- Ability to work with a range of common operating systems.
- Basic understanding of programming languages is helpful.
Material Planner Salaries
Average Base Pay
Material Planner Career Path
Learn how to become a Material Planner, what skills and education you need to succeed, and what level of pay to expect at each step on your career path.
Average Years of Experience
Material Planner Insights
Siemens Healthineers“Firstly I have been working as a material planner for 3+years and I have to say the team quality is amazing.”
TreeHouse Foods“Our supply chain team is excellent and a great team to work with.”
Gentex Corporation“Nice salary and the stock options are good.”
Coca-Cola Europacific Partners“Good place to work and develop career path”
Rolls-Royce“There IT system is not the best”
ALSTOM“Very good for career growth”
Eaton“People I worked with were amazing”
Nestlé Health Science“salary was decent but definitely lower than what it should have been”
Frequently asked questions about the role and responsibilities of a Material Planner
- Demand Planner
- Planner
- Supply Chain Manager
- Production Planner