Continuous Improvement Sr. Engineering Lead

Continuous Improvement Sr. Engineering Lead

DuPont has an exciting and challenging opportunity for an Operational Excellence and Senior Engineering leader at the Spray Polyurethane Foam site located in Wilmington, Illinois. This site employs approximately 150 people and is about 60 miles southwest from downtown Chicago. The role is suited for someone with a solid manufacturing and engineering background, with strong leadership and communication skills. The leader will be accountable for performance management, coaching, and employee development of five direct reports.

The role also involves planning, leading, and managing $1 MM‑3 MM of annual spending in Cap Ex and other plant maintenance/engineering projects to achieve plant/business goals.

• Provides administrative leadership, coaching, and career development for direct reports.
• Demonstrates leadership with strong field presence and involvement in shop floor audits.
• Creates an environment that fosters team and individual empowerment throughout the organization.
• Recognizes personnel for both behavior and performance.
• Ensures implementation and effectiveness of work processes, operating discipline, management systems, enabling technologies, and roles.
• Leads the plant level improvement process by gathering and analyzing data, evaluating improvement opportunities, and implementing improvement projects to close performance gaps and increase manufacturing capability.
• Validates, consolidates, and prioritizes plant improvement opportunities and aligns them to the Business Technology Implementation Plan and Business objectives.
• Sets Site Reliability Strategy and drives implementation through cross-functional teams. Tracks progress, as needed, in global reporting tools.
• Implements improvement projects in reliability, process safety, and to improve plant performance.
• Works with the Run Plant Engineers and Reliability Specialist in collection and analysis of improvement project results data to validate the projects that deliver sustained performance objectives after implementation.
• Promotes and champions Continuous Improvement/LEAN initiatives at the plant.
• Leverages DuPont subject matter experts as needed.
• Provides technical expertise on all matters of reliability engineering, assessment and monitoring for all process equipment (including mechanical, electrical and instrument / control equipment).
• Apply engineering theory, practices, and principles to perform physical failure analysis, determine root cause of equipment failures and conduct equipment performance evaluations.
• Analyze equipment trends, historical data, and field data to recommend and justify improvements to obtain lowest life cycle cost for equipment, maximize production, and reduce process variation.
• Participate in reliability networks and share best practices, successes, and failures.
• Serve as MIQA Leader for the site PSM program.
• Participate in PSM activities as defined by site manuals and practices, mainly focused in mechanical integrity (MI) and quality assurance (QA).
• Interact with the Business Engineering Leaders, Manufacturing Technology organization, and Site Leader to create and successfully execute capital plan (typically $1 MM‑$3 MM/yr).
• Work closely with the site, Manufacturing Technology organization, and Cap Ex resources to execute FEL engineering activities. Leads the team in identifying non-cap or more effective alternatives, following best practices, conducting risk analysis, and developing mitigating plans.
• Drive project execution and coach site team on application of the DuPont Global Project Execution Methodology (GPS) work process.
• Support capital projects by participating in setting equipment specifications to optimize reliability and life cycle cost. Provide technical support for QA/QC, installation, and start-up of all new critical equipment.

• Excellent communication skills, organizational skills, influential leadership and interpersonal skills
• Experience in managing the deliverables needed to prepare project estimates and schedules
• Prior experience improving performance and capability
• A bias for execution, results-oriented, and demonstrated courage
• Conduct…