Overview
Address: Scotland, GB, ML3 0DW
Location: Lightbody, Bothwell Road, Hamilton, ML3 0DW
Shift: Monday – Friday
Salary: Competitive
We are now recruiting for a Senior Planner to join our team at our Lightbody site in Hamilton. This is a brand new role and will give the successful candidate an opportunity to lead a small team as well as forming strong cross functional relationships in a busy manufacturing environment.
135 years of craft baking skills lie behind the quality of the special branded cakes, sweet snacks and slices we produce in Hamilton and 55 million products are produced each year. Lightbody’s is the UK’s largest supplier of celebration cakes to UK retailers, with Disney, Mars, Universal and Thorntons all within the portfolio of branded cakes made under licence. We also make a variety of supermarkets’ well-loved own-label cakes and in-store bakery bites.
To be successful in this role you will be a confident decision-maker who thrives in a fast-paced, high-volume manufacturing environment and is comfortable balancing competing priorities. You bring credibility through experience, use data to guide judgement, and are trusted to make trade-off decisions that protect service, efficiency, and cost.You lead with clarity and resilience, staying calm under pressure while providing direction to both your scheduling team and senior stakeholders. Above all, you take ownership — of the plan, the priorities, and the outcomes.
About the Role
The Senior Planner is responsible for ensuring manufacturing operations run efficiently, predictably, and safely by developing and maintaining robust short, medium, and long-term production plans. Operating within a high-volume food production environment, the role aligns people, materials, and equipment to meet customer demand, service targets, and cost objectives. As the final authority on production priorities and schedule changes, you will play a critical role in enabling operational excellence, supporting food safety and compliance, and ensuring consistent delivery in a dynamic setting.
This is What You’ll Actually Do
You will own the end-to-end production scheduling process, translating demand forecasts into realistic, achievable plans that reflect capacity, labour, materials, and equipment constraints. Working closely with Operations, Materials, Engineering, Quality, and Supply Chain teams, you will optimise throughput, minimise downtime, and respond quickly to unplanned events such as breakdowns, labour shortages, or demand volatility.
You will authorise and adjust schedules as required, ensuring ERP/MRP systems and visual planning tools always reflect the latest agreed plan. Alongside this, you will lead and develop a small team of schedulers, setting clear objectives, conducting regular 1:1s and PDRs, mentoring capability, and embedding best-practice planning standards. You will also support governance requirements, including P74 sign-off, and ensure new product launches are fully planned, reviewed, and production-ready.
As a model of FFG’s core values and behaviours, you will actively champion a culture of continuous improvement and encourage others to do the same. You will also support your team in working towards clearly set objectives and KPI’s.
Ideally, This is You!
Essential:
• Proven experience in production planning, scheduling, or factory operations, ideally within a manufacturing or FMCG environment
• Strong working knowledge of ERP/MRP systems and production scheduling tools
• Advanced Microsoft Excel skills with the ability to analyse and interpret production data
• Demonstrated experience making judgement-based planning decisions and confidently adjusting plans when required
• Strong understanding of manufacturing flows, constraints, efficiencies, and line performance
• Clear, confident communicator able to influence across all levels of the organisation
• Resilient, organised, and effective under pressure in a fast-changing environment
Desirable:
• Experience leading or mentoring a team of schedulers or planners
• Background in high-volume food production or regulated manufacturing environments
• Experience supporting new product introductions and production readiness reviews
• Exposure to continuous improvement initiatives within planning or operations
• Strong commercial awareness with the ability to balance service, cost, and efficiency
What’s in it for you?
• Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Leave to allow quality time with your new arrival!
• Enhanced Pension Scheme for our employees
• Death in Service Benefit
• Free Employee Assistance Programme (open to colleagues and their families)
• Retail discounts accessible via our Benefits Hub platform!
• Company shop available at sites (heavily discounted, yummy products!)
• Refer a Friend Scheme (up to £300 per referral – t&cs dependent)
• Employee Recognition Awards· Extensive Learning & Development opportunities (including opportunities for sponsored professional memberships and our own in-house development course!)
• An opportunity to be part of a fantastic, growing organisation. Head over to our LinkedIn page to find out more!
Our vision is to be the leading specialty bakery group in the UK, and we want the best people in place to achieve this. Our continued success is built entirely on the talented people who work here, so employee development is important to us because everyone is a valued member of the team, and we want every individual to have the skills and capabilities to achieve both your own personal goals and our business goals.
We want good people to join our company, to help our company continue to go from strength to strength. If you would like the opportunity to be part of a fantastic, growing organisation head over to our LinkedIn page to find out more!