Senior Materials Planner Buyer

Talascend is currently seeking a Senior Materials Planner Buyer for a contract opportunity with our client in Madison, Wisconsin.

Overview

The senior materials planner buyer serves as the site subject matter expert for the end-to-end management of purchased materials, components, and services, ensuring uninterrupted material availability to support production and business requirements. This role owns and coordinates materials flow strategies for assigned materials and drives continuous improvement initiatives to ensure supply continuity and service levels.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the first point of escalation for junior materials buyer-planners to resolve supplier issues, material shortages, and other day-to-day opportunities that may disrupt supply continuity.
• Mentor other materials buyer-planners as required by the materials manager.
• Lead phase-in and phase-out planning for new products and engineering changes.
• Translate production requirements, forecasts, MRP signals, inventory levels, lead times, and safety stock requirements into actionable purchase orders and material planning strategies.
• Identify potential material shortages before they impact production and develop recovery plans to maintain supply continuity.
• Monitor and maintain planning parameters, including supplier lead times, minimum order quantities, order multiples, safety stock levels, and other material planning data.
• Partner with materials management, SIOP, operations, warehouse, engineering, quality, and other cross-functional teams to ensure material availability and support production requirements.
• Maintain visibility of current and projected material availability for assigned commodities and components.
• Drive achievement of 100% material availability at the required point of use by proactively identifying, communicating, and escalating supply risks before they disrupt operations.
• Create, maintain, and manage purchase orders for assigned materials and services.
• Ensure purchase orders accurately reflect approved pricing, quantities, delivery schedules, payment terms, freight terms, and other commercial requirements.
• Communicate purchase orders, revisions, cancellations, forecasts, and delivery requirements to suppliers and obtain acknowledgment of supplier commitments.
• Monitor open purchase orders from placement through receipt, expediting, deferring, rescheduling, or canceling orders as business requirements change.
• Maintain accurate purchase order dates, supplier commitments, and related procurement records.
• Ensure purchasing activities comply with established procurement policies, controls, and approval requirements.
• Retain ownership of assigned purchase orders until materials or services have been delivered and successfully received by the facility.
• Serve as the primary operational contact for assigned suppliers.
• Communicate forecasts, demand changes, delivery expectations, performance expectations, and other business requirements to assigned suppliers.
• Monitor supplier performance.
• Lead supplier performance reviews and recovery plans, facilitate scorecard communication, conduct performance reviews, and develop corrective action plans.
• Identify, evaluate, and support the development of new suppliers and alternative sources for assigned materials and commodities.
• Support RFQ/RFP activities, supplier quotation analysis, and source selection.
• Support supplier qualification and onboarding activities in collaboration with quality, engineering, operations, and other stakeholders.
• Identify opportunities for supplier consolidation, dual sourcing, localization, lead-time reduction, cost reduction, and overall supply chain improvement.
• Maintain accurate supplier pricing within purchase orders and procurement records.
• Investigate and resolve pricing discrepancies.
• Track supplier price changes, communicate material cost impacts to supply chain leadership, and ensure all pricing changes are appropriately reviewed and approved before implementation.
• Coordinate and resolve discrepancies involving purchased materials, working with receiving, warehouse, quality, finance, and suppliers to resolve issues and prevent recurrence.
• Drive improvements in supplier reliability and inventory performance.
• Lead escalation efforts for critical shortages and supply disruptions.
• Investigate supplier invoice discrepancies and resolve three-way match exceptions involving purchase orders, receipts, and invoices.
• Maintain accurate purchasing and planning master data, including supplier lead times, minimum order quantities, order multiples, purchasing units of measure, pricing, acknowledgments, and other information required for effective material management.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in supply chain, business, or a related field preferred.
• 7–10 or more years of planning, procurement, inventory, or manufacturing experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of ERP systems.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work with minimal supervision from materials management.
• Critical thinking skills to find solutions that improve site materials management operations.