Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement

A growing, privately held specialty manufacturer is seeking its first Director of Quality & Continuous Improvement to design and build a best-in-class operational excellence program across the organization.

The company has built a highly successful, customer-focused business by occupying a valuable niche in the market, maintaining strong margins, and becoming deeply integrated into its customers’ manufacturing processes. As it enters its next stage of growth, the company is investing in the infrastructure, systems, and operating discipline required to scale successfully.

This is not a traditional quality assurance leadership position, nor is it an opportunity to inherit a mature program. The Director will serve as the architect of the company’s approach to continuous improvement and quality—establishing the strategy, systems, standards, metrics, and culture largely from the ground up.

The successful candidate will bring a continuous improvement mindset first. This person must be able to evaluate the entire organization, identify the highest-impact opportunities, and introduce practical processes that improve consistency, efficiency, quality, and scalability without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. The ideal candidate has either built a similar program or developed their expertise within a world-class manufacturing organization and understands what operational excellence looks like.

• Design and implement a scalable quality management system appropriate for the company’s operations and customer requirements.

• Establish clear quality standards, controls, documentation, metrics, and accountability throughout the organization.

• Strengthen processes related to incoming materials, production quality, finished products, nonconformances, corrective and preventive actions, customer complaints, and supplier quality.

• Move the organization from a primarily reactive quality environment toward a proactive, prevention-based approach.

• Evaluate current testing, documentation, and quality-control practices and develop a prioritized plan for improvement.

• Prepare the organization for future certifications, customer expectations, or regulatory requirements as needed.

• Build processes that promote consistent execution while remaining practical and commercially minded.

• Assess the company’s current operations, workflows, systems, and organizational capabilities.

• Develop a multiyear roadmap for continuous improvement and quality that aligns with the company’s growth strategy.

• Identify and prioritize opportunities with the greatest potential impact on productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, cost, capacity, and margins.

• Establish a practical operating system for continuous improvement, including governance, project selection, accountability, and performance tracking.

• Translate world-class manufacturing principles into solutions appropriate for the company’s size, culture, and business model.

• Partner with leaders across manufacturing, supply chain, engineering, sales, customer service, finance, and other functions to improve end-to-end business processes.

• Lead high-impact initiatives involving process flow, throughput, waste reduction, yield, reliability, scheduling, inventory, cost, and customer responsiveness.

• Apply Lean, Six Sigma, root-cause analysis, value-stream mapping, and other improvement methodologies where they will create meaningful business value.

• Build fact-based performance metrics and dashboards that give leadership greater visibility into operating results.

• Develop a disciplined process for identifying problems, determining root causes, implementing corrective actions, and sustaining…