Supply Chain Manager job description
539 verified openings in Inventory & Logistics
Ten percent of this occupation earns under $65,120 and ten percent over $194,900, a spread of nearly three to one around a $107,230 median across 221,180 workers, measured May 2025. The same 11-3071 line stands behind the logistics manager and warehouse manager pages here, and the range covers buildings and networks of wildly different size. Supply chain managers direct purchasing, production, warehousing, distribution, and financial forecasting to hold costs down and keep accuracy, service, and safety up.
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Deciding what equipment and how many people it takes to load, unload, move, and store material is the first call of the job, and the rest follows from that authority: strategic and tactical purchasing, material requirements planning, inventory control, and warehousing; transport routes picked to combine shipments or consolidate distribution; prices and terms negotiated with suppliers and freight forwarders. They also define the metrics product cost and quality get judged against, work with planners on demand forecasts, analyze inventory to raise turns, and write the procedures tying the function to sales, finance, and production.
Common Skills and Technologies
Seven skills tie for the top score of 4.0: reading comprehension, active listening, speaking, monitoring, coordination, judgment and decision making, and time management. The software is enterprise scale, with SAP, Oracle PeopleSoft, and Microsoft Dynamics on the ERP side, SQL and Microsoft SQL Server behind the data, Visio for process mapping, and the inventory management systems employers put in postings alongside Excel. MEDITECH, a hospital information system, is on the same hot technologies list, which is what this work looks like inside a health system.
Education, Training, and Career Path
Experience does the sorting here. Two thirds of respondents called for a bachelor's, a fifth a master's, one in ten a certificate beyond the bachelor's, the rest an associate's, a more graduate-heavy bar than the analyst side of the same field. O*NET Job Zone Four again, the same band as the analyst role. Reported titles reach supply chain director, so the step up stays inside the occupation.
Sources: O*NET 30.0, 11-3071.04 Supply Chain Managers, https://www.onetonline.org/link/summary/11-3071.04. BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, 11-3071, https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm.