Job Description
Senior Specialist, Process Steward – Supply and Demand Planning
The Opportunity:
Join a global biopharma company with a 130-year legacy and mission to achieve new milestones in healthcare. Be part of a technology-driven, data-led organization supporting a diversified portfolio of medicines, vaccines, and animal health products. Work alongside passionate teams that use data, analytics, and insights to drive decisions and tackle some of the world’s greatest health threats.
Our Technology Centers are globally distributed hubs that enable our digital transformation and business outcomes across IT. They bring together diverse teams to collaborate, share best practices, and deliver solutions that save and improve lives.
This role is based at our Hyderabad Tech Center and follows a hybrid working model (3 days onsite, 2 days remote). Candidates are expected to reside within commuting distance of the Hyderabad office.
Role Overview:
The Senior Specialist, Process Steward for Supply and Demand Planning provides hands-on process expertise and close support to Product Management, business stakeholders, and technology teams to ensure planning processes and digital capabilities are valuable, viable, standardized, and sustainable. This role serves as a business process expert and product/business analyst, translating user needs, process requirements, and planning challenges into clear requirements, backlog items, testing support, training content, adoption support, and continuous improvement opportunities.
The Senior Specialist Process Steward supports effective supply and demand planning by partnering with planning teams, supply chain leaders, Product Managers, Engineering, data owners, and support teams to improve end-to-end planning processes, support process adherence, and contribute to successful deployment, adoption, and sustainment of planning solutions across business areas.
What will you do in this role
- Apply a structured approach to discover, document, and manage supply and demand planning process needs, including opportunity statements, use cases, user insights, business requirements, and acceptance criteria.
- Partner with demand planning, supply planning, commercial, manufacturing, logistics, finance, data, and technology stakeholders to identify user journeys, pain points, unmet needs, and process improvement opportunities.
- Translate business process needs into clear problem statements, backlog items, business requirements, and user stories that can be prioritized and prepared for development.
- Facilitate alignment between business stakeholders and Engineering teams by clarifying business logic, process rules, data dependencies, and expected outcome.
- Develop and maintain strong expertise in supply and demand planning processes, supporting process governance, adherence, sustainment metrics, user adoption, and operational performance improvements.
- Use business and user insights to support solution options, prioritization discussions, and continuous improvement opportunities across planning processes and digital capabilities.
- Support the design of the end-to-end planning ecosystem, including business process flows, process controls, planning handoffs, roles and responsibilities, and integration points.
- Serve as a business partner for SDLC activities, including requirements specifications, data ownership inputs, design reviews, testing strategy, user acceptance testing, defect triage, and release readiness.
- Support customer-facing product and process management activities for planning applications, reporting, visualization layers, enhancements, and ongoing improvements.
- Facilitate data source integration, data lineage understanding, master data requirements, and alignment with foundational data and analytics capabilities.
- Own and maintain relevant business process documentation, including Global Operating Model content, SOPs, standard business processes, work instructions, training materials, mobile app content, legal and privacy inputs, and localization documentation.
- Prepare and support training, communications, deployment readiness, and change adoption activities for the global supply and demand planning community.
- Contribute to planning standards, communities of practice, innovation, experimentation, and new use cases that improve planning effectiveness and business value.
- Manage backlog items from ideation through ready-for-development, ensuring requirements are complete, prioritized, validated, and aligned to business outcomes.
- Provide hands-on process stewardship by coordinating cross-functional inputs, tracking risks and dependencies, supporting issue escalation, and ensuring planning process activities remain aligned with agreed business priorities.
What Should you have:
- Bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain, Business, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Analytics, or a related field; advanced degree preferred.
- Typically 5–8 years of relevant experience in supply planning, demand planning, integrated business planning, SOP, supply chain operations, process stewardship, or digital product/business analysis.
- Strong understanding of planning processes, business requirements definition, process documentation, testing, change adoption, and operational sustainment.
- Experience working with cross-functional global teams across business, technology, data, and operational functions.
- Experience supporting planning systems, analytics, reporting, or visualization capabilities; knowledge of SAP, SAP IBP, Maestro (advanced planning tools), or similar platforms preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to coordinate cross-functional work, facilitate stakeholder alignment. Support delivery across business, technology, data, and operational teams.
- Direct hands on experience with Supply Chain Systems deployments, hyper care and sustainment
- Strong interpersonal skills and a team work attitude
- Experience in life sciences / pharmaceuticals industry preferred
Primary Skills:
Global Supply Demand Planning / Supply Chain Planning, SAP ECC – Sales Order Management, Forecast Management (Maestro), Outbound supply chain process.
Secondary Skills:
SAP HANA, Warehouse management, Pharma background, MS Office, Power BI
Key Skills and Capabilities
- Business process analysis and end-to-end process design
- Supply and demand planning domain knowledge
- Requirements gathering, user story development, and backlog management
- Stakeholder facilitation and cross-functional collaboration
- Stakeholder coordination, meeting facilitation, and clear communication across business and technical teams
- Process governance support, risk tracking, prioritization support, and operational follow-through
- Data literacy, data lineage awareness, and analytical problem solving
- Testing, UAT coordination, release readiness, and support transition
- Change management experience, training development, and user adoption support
- Clear written and verbal communication in English with business and technical audiences
Measures of Success
- Planning processes are clearly documented, standardized, adopted, and sustained across relevant business areas.
- Business requirements and backlog items are complete, actionable, prioritized, and aligned to measurable business outcomes.
- Planning solutions are successfully tested, deployed, supported, and continuously improved based on user and business feedback.
- Users are prepared for process and system changes through effective training, communications, and change adoption support.
- Process performance, adherence, and sustainment metrics are monitored and used to drive improvement actions.
Who we are
We are known as well-known org Inc., Rahway, New Jersey, USA in the United States and Canada and MSD everywhere else. For more than a century, bringing forward medicines and vaccines for many of the worlds most challenging diseases. Today, our company continues to be at the forefront of research to deliver innovative health solutions and advance the prevention and treatment of diseases that threaten people and animals around the world.
What we look for
Imagine getting up in the morning for a job as important as helping to save and improve lives around the world. Here, you have that opportunity. You can put your empathy, creativity, digital mastery, or scientific genius to work in collaboration with a diverse group of colleagues who pursue and bring hope to countless people who are battling some of the most challenging diseases of our time. Our team is constantly evolving, so if you are among the intellectually curious, join us—and start making your impact today.
Required Skills:
Demand Planning, Demand Planning Forecasting, Demand Supply Planning, Forecast Management, MIDI Maestro, Sales Order Management, SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC), Supply Chain, Supply Chain Planning (SCP), Supply Management, Supply Planning
Preferred Skills:
SAP HANA, Warehouse Management
Current Employees applyHERE
Current Contingent Workers applyHERE
Secondary Language(s) Job Description:
#MSDHYDIT
Search Firm Representatives Please Read Carefully
Merck Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA, also known as Merck Sharp Dohme LLC, Rahway, NJ, USA, does not accept unsolicited assistance from search firms for employment opportunities. All CVs / resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at our company without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of our company. No fee will be paid in the event a candidate is hired by our company as a result of an agency referral where no pre-existing agreement is in place. Where agency agreements are in place, introductions are position specific. Please, no phone calls or emails.
Employee Status:
Regular
Relocation:
Domestic
VISA Sponsorship:
No
Travel Requirements:
No Travel Required
Flexible Work Arrangements:
Hybrid
Shift:
Not Indicated
Valid Driving License:
No
Hazardous Material(s):
n/a
Job Posting End Date:
09/11/2026*A job posting is effective until 11:59:59PM on the dayBEFORE the listed job posting end date. Please ensure you apply to a job posting no later than the dayBEFORE the job posting end date.
Requisition ID: R412830
