This role sits within Alcon's Supply Chain function and provides enterprise leadership for demand strategy, planning excellence, and decision-enabling insights, ensuring products are delivered efficiently and reliably so that people can see brilliantly. The Senior Manager, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) is accountable for setting the standard for S&OP demand planning, governance, performance, and continuous improvement.

This role provides enterprise-level leadership for demand planning and S&OP governance, consolidating and constructively challenging cross-functional inputs, translating market dynamics into decision-quality insights, and enabling timely executive actions. The Senior Manager serves as a strategic advisor to senior leaders, balancing analytical rigor with business judgment to drive alignment, accelerate planning maturity, and strengthen accountability for outcomes.

This leader drives cross-functional alignment across Commercial, Finance, and Supply Chain; challenges assumptions and scenarios; and delivers clear, executive-ready recommendations that enable the business to balance demand, supply, service, and financial objectives across the 3-24-month planning horizon.

In this role, a typical day will include:

• Set direction and govern the demand planning component of the S&OP process, establishing disciplined inputs, aligned assumptions, and consistent enterprise outputs across the planning horizon.
• Lead enterprise demand analytics (trends, forecast accuracy, bias, volatility), converting insights into prioritized actions that improve plan quality, capability, and planning effectiveness.
• Drive cycle-over-cycle executive insights into demand plan changes, quantifying key drivers, risks, and tradeoffs and translating them into implications for supply, inventory, service, and financial performance.
• Establish enterprise governance for planning master data (product hierarchies, market/customer mappings, calendars, key assumptions), ensuring standards, ownership, and sustained data quality through cross-functional alignment.
• Act as the senior demand planning leader and thought partner to Commercial and Finance, aligning on demand drivers, promotions, portfolio changes, and financial assumptions and ensuring decisions are captured and executed through the S&OP cycle.
• Lead governance of new product launch demand within S&OP, aligning stakeholders on assumptions, evaluating scenarios, and integrating launches into the enterprise demand plan with clear risks and mitigation actions.
• Enable portfolio and rationalization decisions by assessing item-level demand and inventory impacts, governing phase-in/phase-out assumptions, and ensuring smooth transitions with minimal service and financial disruption.
• Chair Demand Review discussions, surfacing risks and opportunities, recommending tradeoffs, and driving timely decisions and ownership at each step of the S&OP cycle.
• Align strategically with S&OE leadership to translate approved demand plans into executable signals, communicate implications, and ensure an effective handoff from planning to execution with closed-loop feedback.
• Own demand performance management across forecast accuracy, bias, plan stability, and inventory health-diagnosing root causes, setting targets, and driving corrective actions with accountable stakeholders.
• Lead executive communication for S&OP demand, synthesizing complex data into concise narratives, scenarios, decisions required, and action tracking for leadership forums.
• Sponsor and drive continuous improvement across process, analytics, and tools-standardizing ways of working, strengthening planning parameters, and elevating organizational capability.

• Provide people leadership by coaching and developing planners and analysts, setting clear expectations and performance measures, building succession and capability plans, and fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

• Lead GxP compliance and audit readiness for planning processes, ensuring documentation integrity, accurate records, and adherence to SOPs and training standards.

What you will bring to Alcon:

• Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +15 yrs; Assoc.+11 yrs; M.S.+4 yrs; PhD+3 yrs)
• The ability to fluently read, write, understand, and communicate in English
• 7 Years of Relevant Experience
• 5 Years of Demonstrated Leadership

How You Can Thrive at Alcon:

• Lead alongside high-performing teams in a culture that values collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Grow your career through leadership development and meaningful enterprise impact.
• Join Alcon's mission to provide outstanding, innovative products and solutions to improve sight, improve lives, and grow your career!
• Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, flexible time off, and much more!

See your impact at: alcon.com/careers

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