Operational Excellence Lead

About Shepherd Electric Supply Since 1892, Shepherd Electric Supply has been the first call when complex, time-critical electrical challenges need to be solved and reliability truly matters. We move materials accurately and on time so contractors stay on schedule, projects stay on track, and customers never have to wonder if we’ll come through.

Our success comes from people who take pride in doing things the right way — safely, accurately, and with care for teammates and customers alike. If you want to do work that matters at a company that notices, this is the place.

Why This Role Matters Reliability is not a slogan at Shepherd — it is a system. And every system needs someone who closes the loop between when something goes wrong and when we can prove it will not happen again.

We run on a continuous improvement loop. We call that loop ShepOS — the Shepherd Operating System. Not a process. Not software. The operating environment that keeps Shepherd reliable as we scale toward one billion in revenue by 2030. ShepOS has five pillars:

The Compass orients us — vision, mission, and values. The fallback when no play exists for the moment.

Playbooks and Plays define what good looks like — judgment frameworks for each function, with specific moves for specific situations. The right call lives in the system, not the person.

The Reliability Standard holds us to it — Shepherd’s five-metric operational scorecard for what reliable looks like in numbers.

UET (Unquality Event Tracking) shows what to fix — how the system learns from what goes wrong, one filed gap at a time.

Above and Beyond Recognition shows what to repeat — how the system learns from what goes right, one named moment at a time.

The Operational Excellence Lead is the position coach who watches the film at the place where the UET pillar meets Playbooks and Plays. The role that names the patterns, drafts the plays that need to exist, and makes sure the loop actually closes — so the same broken pattern does not open into next quarter, and the quarter after, and the quarter after that.

A Shepherd Standard — what we call a playbook — is the working guide for how a specific function at Shepherd operates. Shipping. Inside sales. Branch expansion. Each playbook contains the individual plays — the specific, repeatable actions a team takes in a known situation — and defines who owns what, how decisions get made, what good looks like, and what to do when things go wrong.

A playbook is not a procedures manual. It does not replace judgment; it builds it. The person on the floor still calls the play. The playbook tells them what plays exist and when to use them — and it is the standard we measure against when something goes wrong.

A UET — Unquality Event Tracking — is a broken play. A wrong pick. A missed delivery. A quote that went out wrong. Any documented gap between what the Reliability Standard requires and what the customer — internal or external — actually received. “Unquality” means the work did not meet the standard we promised. Every UET filed is someone on the team saying: we did not keep our promise on this one, here is what happened, so we can keep it the next  the first quarter of 2026, UETs logged grew from roughly 150 in January to over 700 in March.

That growth is partly because we are getting better at catching errors — and partly because the operation is moving faster than our ability to close the loop on what we find. The Operational Excellence Lead owns that loop.

Every error logged is a customer who felt friction, a contractor whose job got harder, or a Shepherd team member who had to stop what they were doing to fix something. Filing one is an act of ownership, not blame. But signal without follow-through is just noise — and when the same pattern repeats next week, next month, next quarter, we lose more than time.

We lose the trust that took years to build.

This is the role that makes sure that does not happen  closer. The position coach who watches the film so the people running the play do not have to figure out what went wrong twice.

Key Outcomes The Error Lifecycle, End to End Own the daily, weekly, and monthly cadence of how Shepherd…