Operations Excellence Manager

From tree to table, POM Wonderful delivers a whole lot of healthy. Known for our iconic double-bubble bottle, we grow, harvest, package, and market fresh pomegranates, pomegranate arils, and a selection of delicious pomegranate-blended juices and teas. With over 9,000 acres in California’s Central Valley, POM Wonderful is committed to unleashing the antioxidant power of our handpicked pomegranates.

The Advanced Manufacturing Manager leads the development and implementation of advanced manufacturing technologies and continuous improvement strategies that improve safety, quality, reliability, productivity, cost, and overall equipment effectiveness. This position combines automation, robotics, machine vision, manufacturing data, artificial intelligence, Lean methodologies, and structured problem solving to deliver measurable and sustainable operational results. The manager partners with Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, Quality, EHS, IT/OT, Finance, equipment manufacturers, and system integrators to identify opportunities, develop business cases, lead implementation, support operational adoption, and verify that expected benefits are achieved and sustained.

Compensation - $ - $. Final compensation will be dependent upon skills & experience.

• Develop and maintain a prioritized advanced manufacturing and continuous improvement roadmap aligned with plant and business objectives.
• Identify and evaluate opportunities to improve manufacturing processes through robotics, collaborative robots, machine vision, automated inspection, intelligent sensors, automated material handling, process automation, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence.
• Lead automation and manufacturing improvement projects from opportunity identification and business-case development through design, implementation, commissioning, startup, stabilization, and operational handoff.
• Conduct capacity, constraint, downtime, reliability, waste, quality, labor, and OEE analysis to identify and prioritize improvement initiatives.
• Lead A3 problem solving, DMAIC, root-cause analysis, Kaizen, value-stream mapping, TPM, standard work, and other structured continuous improvement activities.
• Determine whether manufacturing losses are best addressed through automation, maintenance, training, process redesign, standard work, or another countermeasure.
• Translate operational needs into project charters, functional requirements, scopes of work, acceptance criteria, budgets, schedules, and implementation plans.
• Develop capital requests and ROI analyses that define the problem, investment, risks, expected operational impact, and financial return.
• Coordinate cross-functional technical and design reviews with Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, Quality, EHS, IT/OT, OEMs, and system integrators.
• Participate in factory acceptance testing, site acceptance testing, commissioning, performance validation, and project closeout.
• Ensure automation projects address machine safety, food safety, hygienic design, sanitation, maintainability, software backups, spare parts, technical documentation, training, and lifecycle support.
• Evaluate practical AI applications including predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, computer vision, process optimization, automated reporting, knowledge management, and operator decision support.
• Partner with Electrical and Controls leadership to establish requirements for equipment integration, controls architecture, industrial networking, data collection, system backups, and documentation.
• Establish project baselines, performance targets, control plans, and benefits-verification methods; confirm that completed improvements are sustained.
• Coach cross-functional teams in structured problem solving, data-driven…