Senior Buyer/Planner Staff

Job Description:

Confluent Medical Technologies is a financially healthy and rapidly growing medical device company dedicated to working collaboratively with our customers, taking their projects from rapid prototype into high volume production. Our unparalleled technical expertise, proven experience and partnership with our clients has allowed us to perfect the process necessary to deliver world-class medical devices through innovative material science, engineering, and manufacturing. Our primary capabilities include: Nitinol components and tubing, balloon expandable stents and catheters, complex catheters, biomedical textiles, and high precision polymer tubing. We take pride in our position as the leader in the medical technology space and are driven by a passion to create products that our clients have envisioned for their customers.

We are seeking aBuyer/Planner, Senior Staff to join our team in Costa Rica. The selected candidate will provide leadership, coaching, and mentoring to the planning team, with a focus on production planning, capacity scale-up, and manufacturing activities aligned with the global corporate SIOP (Sales, Inventory, and Operations Planning) strategy. This role is responsible for coordinating material planning and production scheduling to ensure the timely availability of materials and support manufacturing operations across one or more product lines.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Leadership: May Supervise, train, develop, appraise work assignments of personnel.

Supervises:

• Supply Chain Clerk
• Planner I
• Planner II

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSABILITIES including but not limited to the following:

Business Essentials

• Responsible for ensuring personal and company compliance with local and company regulations, policies and procedures for Health, Safety and Environmental compliance.
• Participates and leads discussion with costumers around delivery schedules.
• Analyzes, recommends and implements processes and procedures to provide accurate results on the inventory control of raw and/or any other materials.
• Develop strategic objectives that focus on areas of quality, cost, flexibility, productivity and speed.
• Demonstrate the ability to consistently deliver products and services to meet customer needs.
• Influence junior peers on continuous process improvement as an accepted way of life in business.
• Accurately identify risks that affect supply, transformation, delivery and customer demand and set mitigation plans independently.
• Visualize the total process and aid in locating problem areas using process mapping, quality improvement and visualization tools to locate, quantify and correct root causes of problems.

Execution, scheduling and control

• Considered the subject matter expert in the APS system with Kinaxis-Rapid Response.
• Implement and determine the appropriate scheduling technique to control capacity at work centers: Finite scheduling, Infinite scheduling, Forward scheduling, Backward scheduling to ensure sufficient capacity to implement MRP by using CRP.
• Recommends and implement measures to improve production control methods.
• Partnering with manufacturing and materials management teams to meet/agree build plans thru the SIOP process.
• Expert in calculations for efficiency, utilization and productivity.

Enterprise resources planning (ERP)

• Cooperate in the alignment of the materials management strategy with the business strategies driving sales, marketing, finance and manufacturing using Kinaxis-Rapid Response and SIOP.
• Determine the need for capacity to address expected demand, execute the resulting plans, and update planning and financial information to reflect the results.
• Understand output of materials requirement planning (MRP), capacity management and advanced planning system technologies.
• Be capable of discussing and demonstrating the MRP gross-to-net explosion process while ̥̥have knowledge of planning utilizing action messaging, have knowledge of planning time fences in MRP, be capable of defining the types of replenishment orders found in the MRP grid, be capable of working with pegged requirements in MRP, know how to perform order rescheduling in MRP , understand the various MRP output reports, know when MRP is to be generate, have knowledge of detail capacity planning (CRP), have detailed knowledge of the CRP components (work centers, labor and machines, routings, setup times, run, standards and move times) necessary to run CRP.
• Understand advanced planning systems relationships to MRP planning systems.
• Promote the usage of the EPICOR/APS tools over manual/isolated spreadsheets.

Supply Chain & Inventory Management

• Understand that supply chain management spans all movement and storage of raw materials, work-in-process inventory and finished goods from point of origin to point of consumption.
• Demonstrate the ability to visualize the total process and aid in locating problem areas using process mapping, quality improvement and visualization tools to locate, quantify and correct root causes of problems.
• Perform periodic evaluations to maintain processes by gathering pertinent information such as problem symptoms from knowledgeable sources and carrying these through to the problems, potential causes and root causes of the problem.
• Active involvement in departmental inventory management strategies and objectives.
• Know how to apply trade-off analysis to balance requirements of demand and supply.
• Understand the different classes of inventory (raw materials, WIP, finished goods, MRO, service parts, damaged and obsolete).
• Understand the difference between independent and dependent demand inventory.
• Along with the Purchasing team shall lead activities to balance demand and supply while keeping a healthy level of inventory for the process/products owned

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE:

• Bachelor’s degreecompleted in Industrial Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field.
• Minimum of 7 years of experience in similar roles.
• Experience in the medical device industry is a plus
• Advanced level of English (C1)

OTHER SKILLS AND ABILITIES

• Advanced English communication skills, both written and verbal, with the ability to prepare reports, present information, and communicate effectively with stakeholders at all organizational levels.
• Strong analytical, mathematical, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to interpret complex data, evaluate multiple factors, and develop creative solutions to challenging business problems.
• Extensive expertise in the field, with a comprehensive understanding of related disciplines, business operations, and cross-functional dependencies.
• Proven ability to exercise sound judgment, work independently, and make decisions in complex or ambiguous situations with limited standardization.
• Demonstrated leadership and consulting capabilities, including advising management, influencing stakeholders, and resolving sensitive or high-pressure situations with diplomacy and professionalism.
• Ability to interpret technical documentation, business procedures, and regulatory requirements, and adapt to changing priorities and work schedules.