Operational Excellence Manager; OpEx Manager

Operational Excellence Manager (OpEx Manager)

Central - Nottingham

Op Ex

Full time

Permanent

We’re excited to offer an excellent opportunity for an experienced Operational Excellence Manager to join our team in Nottingham and play a key role in driving continuous improvement across the business.

At The Compleat Food Group, we’re proud to be a food business built on purpose and passion. Formed in 2021, we’re on a mission to create

Food to Feel Good - great quality, tasty and affordable food that people love to eat.

We’re home to some of the UK’s most exciting and loved food brands, including Wall’s Pastry, Pork Farms, Wrights, The Real Yorkshire Pudding Co., unearthed, Vadasz, Squeaky Bean, Palace Culture, and Harvey & Brockless. Alongside our branded portfolio, we’re a leading supplier of delicious own-label pastry, sweet bakery, party food, olives and antipasti, added-value egg products, continental meats, dips and sauces and plant-based food to the UK’s major retailers, as well as across food service.

With over 6,000 talented colleagues across 17 sites, and an annual turnover of £1.3bn, we’re united by a shared ambition to shape the future of food for the better.

We are backed by European private equity firm PAI Partners.

Location: Nottingham

Working Hours: Monday – Thursday: 8:30am – 5pm & Friday: 8:30am – 4pm

Salary: £65,000 per annum

We are looking for a highly motivated professional to drive the identification and quantification of the improvement agenda in collaboration with the site leadership team, ensuring maximum focus and return on key strategic challenges. You will act as a leading change agent within the business, identifying and closing gaps in operational efficiency, capacity utilisation, wastage, quality, and safety against approved targets.

A key part of the role is embedding an Operational Excellence (OpEx) culture across the site by coaching, facilitating, and developing colleagues at all levels, contributing to ongoing OpEx delivery. Additionally, you will manage projects from concept through to handover, taking full responsibility for delivering them to the required time, cost, and specification standards while maintaining the highest levels of safety and quality compliance.

• Lead the diagnostic cycle to define the annual ‘bottom up’ Operational Excellence budget
• To collaborate with manufacturing colleagues to identify improvement opportunities, utilising data analysis, process observations and industry best practices and implementing flight plans to delivery.
• Provide analytic support to enable an understanding of Current state, baseline performance and capture existing issues.
• Implement principles of project governance and administration, including reporting on progress to plan and reporting of benefits delivery
• Collaboratively support and lead multi skilled/cross functional teams
• Use industry knowledge, product and equipment knowledge, project management experience and relationships across the organisation to enable successful delivery of complex/challenging projects.
• Collate data and present in an understandable format to be able to deliver required change
• Coaching and developing of Compleat Food colleagues from management to shop floor
• Develop and upskill colleagues in lean manufacturing principles, tools and techniques
• Facilitate, coach and support the effective deployment of a tiered Performance Management system at site level

• Formal qualification in an OpEx methodology such as but not limited to Lean Six sigma, Lean, TPS
• Bachelor’s degree or qualification in a vocational or specialised field short of a degree level (HNC/HND) or Apprenticeship
• Minimum 5 years of work experience, preferably in manufacturing environments
• Proven experience of implementing and leading teams in delivery of continuous improvement projects and embedding an OpEx culture with quantifiable business impact
• Experience of coaching, developing, facilitating and leading teams
• Strong financial acumen including the ability to accurately value the monetary impact of initiatives
• Formal Lean/Lean Six sigma,…