Operational Excellence Manager

We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Operational Excellence Manager to join our Implementation Operations and Transformation team. The ideal candidate will partner with department managers, development teams, field support resources, business partners, customers, and vendors to support both tactical and strategic goals. This role requires creating and managing the execution of process improvement initiatives, designing solutions that increase efficiency and proficiency, drive employee engagement, and improve internal and external customer satisfaction. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Partnership and Collaboration: Partner with department managers, development teams, field support resources, business partners, customers, and vendors to drive improvements to meet tactical and strategic goals. Build strong relationships with internal customers and external partners to gain alignment and commitment to outcomes. Tailor communications to the needs of different audiences from a variety of functional groups and from senior leadership level to line level team members. 

• Process Improvement: Create and manage the execution of process improvement initiatives. Map processes, design and launch solutions, and establish controls that increase efficiency and proficiency, drive employee engagement, reduce costs, shorten cycle times, and improve internal and external customer satisfaction. 

• Change Management: Coordinate operational change management for rollouts of changes to procedures, policies, technologies, and new products. Manage communications across internal departments and provide support to trainers and managers.  

• Gap Analysis: Improve departmental and cross-departmental processes and procedures by identifying gaps, ambiguities, and inconsistencies. Evaluate root causes, failure modes, wastes, and defects and provide insights of largest opportunities to business leaders. Recommend solutions to management and other stakeholders to mitigate risks and gain alignment and prioritization for implementation. 

• Needs Assessment: Lead efforts to identify department and employee needs through policy and procedure reviews, root-cause analysis, surveys, interviews, and job shadowing. 

• Data-Driven Decisions: Partner with analysts to drive data-driven insights and decisions. Provide critically constructive feedback to question analysis. Leverage analysis to tell data driven stories, make compelling business cases, influence priorities, and deliver results. 

• Cost and Efficiency Projects: Drive projects to minimize costs, cycle times, and wastes with measurable improvements by project milestones and deadlines. 

• Best Practices: Develop and implement departmental and cross-departmental best practices. Define and document standard operating procedures with department managers and technical writers to drive adoption of process improvements through strategic communication and learning facilitation. 

• Improvement Leadership: Foster a culture of continuous improvement on the team by training team members on improvement and change management methodologies. Integrate transformational practices and templates into daily working models with teams and coach others on how to best leverage the methods to be successful. 

Qualifications: 

• Education: BS degree in business or similar experience preferred. 

• Certifications: Green belt certification in Lean Six Sigma, black belt certification preferred or equivalent continuous improvement education. 

• Experience: Proven experience using Total Quality Management (TQM) and change management methodologies. 

• Skills: Strong project management skills, exceptional communication and interpersonal skills, and the ability to work collaboratively across various teams and departments using influence to drive alignment and results.