About This Role
This highly visible role leads initiatives to drive a culture of continuous improvement and operational discipline across all manufacturing and support processes. The Continuous Improvement Manager partners with cross-functional teams to lead strategic process improvement initiatives that enhance safety, quality, delivery, and cost performance. This position champions lean principles and structured problem-solving techniques, ensuring alignment between site-level improvement initiatives and broader regional operational excellence strategy. It requires a hands-on leader who can both facilitate and execute improvement projects while building capability within the organization.
Responsibilities
- Develop, lead, and execute the continuous improvement strategy in alignment with business objectives, working closely with leadership and cross-functional teams
- Ensure strategies are aligned with operational and regional objectives
- Identify, prioritize, and manage continuous improvement projects that deliver measurable results in operational impact to safety, quality, delivery, and cost while removing barriers to improve process flow
- Facilitate Kaizen events, value stream mapping, root cause analyses, and other structured improvement activities to achieve targeted outcomes
- Partner with all departments including Operations, Quality, Engineering, Maintenance, Supply Chain, Sales and Finance to analyze processes, identify improvement opportunities, and implement sustainable solutions
- Establish and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress of continuous improvement activities and communicate results and recommendations to site leadership
- Drive Daily Visual Management
- Monitor and improve key operational metrics that are linked to business goal results
- Demonstrate results through performance measurement and analysis
- Develop dashboards and performance tracking mechanisms to monitor site improvement progress and provide status updates on CI initiatives and activities
- Lead training sessions and workshops to build site-wide capability in Lean and Six Sigma principles, driving engagement and accountability for continuous improvement at all levels
- Serve as subject matter expert in Lean manufacturing principles and structured problem-solving methodologies
- Influence leaders and frontline employees to adopt continuous improvement principles to drive a culture of accountability, data-driven decision making, and waste elimination
- Lead cross-functional improvement projects from concept through implementation and sustainment
- Develop project charters, timelines, and measurable success criteria
- Partner with Regional Operational Excellence leaders to deploy standardized tools, systems, and best practices
- Conduct regular reviews and recommend updates and revisions to standard operating procedures, work instructions, and training materials to reflect process improvements