Process & Quality Leader

PURPOSE OF THE JOB
The Process & Quality Leader provides technical and business leadership in product manufacturing and product specifications. The Process & Quality Leader interfaces across the technical network in the Foam Business to provide solutions to product manufacturing challenges as well as advances and innovation in manufacturing processes and materials. The Process & Quality Leader is the subject matter expert on all plant process, quality, and raw material areas. The Process & Quality Leader has two hourly direct reports to help manage and facilitate daily operations and reporting.
This position reports to the Plant Leader and is a member of the Plant Leadership Team (NLT). As a member of the NLT, the Process & Quality Leader helps develop and deploy strategies to meet the business objectives.
JOB RESPONSIBILITIES
Live the Safety stand, adhere to the safety responsibilities.

• Builds and supports a culture where safety is a fundamental value
• Ensuring a safe, clean, and environmentally compliant work environment
• Adhere to and continuously improve all safety policies, procedures, and standards
• Actively participates in and follows requirements for Process Safety Management (PSM)
• Develops safe work practices and job training that reduce risk for process related tasks
• Operate with zero environmental non-conformities to applicable company and government regulations
• Support and participate in wellness and community initiatives

Drive Plant Quality Excellence

• Act as the gatekeeper to ensure all quality control specifications are met for all products according to ASTM standard testing, UL, R&D Industries and FM Global standards and internal specifications
• Maintain master files and history on all specifications and procedures
• Stay current on all Quality Control (QC) specifications and act as the subject-matter expert for QC
  • Educate all plant leadership and primary employees on quality control requirements
  • Train all primary employees on QC procedures and processes
  • Interface with Foam QC resources to ensure that plant has adopted all current QC specifications
• Develop and sustain practices to minimize Cost to Non-Quality (CONQ)
• Constantly strives to improve product performance in all areas and matches up customer needs with technical solutions to ensure customer Fitness for Use (FFU) are met with our products
• Provide technical and process support to our customers and sales support team as required

Lead Plant Technical Excellence

• Owns and develops all plant product quality specifications, making modifications as necessary to ensure the specification is adequate to ensure customer FFU
• Responsible for driving excellent performance in all extrusion processes
• Prove out all product capabilities and constantly drive for improvement in product characteristics, system capability, and consistency of results
  • Establish repeatable recipes and settings for each product
  • Establish extruder start-up and shut-down processes
  • Drive product changeover consistency and effectiveness
• Create and implement best practices at the extruder level for process setup and control
• Interface with Engineering and S&T to solve all product and material challenges
• Support implementation of new processes and product introductions
• Conduct process improvement trials and incorporate learning into technical improvement plans

Leading and Developing Talent

• Serve as a cross-functional team member on the Foam Divisional Process Engineers Network to improve process performance across the division
• Provides guidance to operations technicians and maintenance technicians on the manufacturing process and process control procedures
• Owns the development of all Extruder and Quality Technicians growing their technical capability through focused training and performance feedback
• Leads, coaches, and teaches employees to reinforce OC values and ownership of plant processes and performance
• Leads in the training and development of internal talent to establish a pipeline to fill future openings at the positions of Extruder and Quality Technician

Lead FI Pillar

• Work with the TPM steering team to develop the master plan and subsequent strategies for the implementation of FI Pillar
• Utilize FI methodologies to drive continuous improvement, lead root-cause analysis, and implement corrective actions
• Partner cross-functionally with finance, engineering, and other teams to understand the current performance challenges, while developing sound solution strategies

• Effectively mentor teams and individuals of the plant around FI principles and processes

JOB REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• 3-5 years manufacturing experience required
  • Academic and/or practical knowledge and experience of materials science and extrusion processes strongly preferred
• Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering or applicable field preferred

EXPERIENCE:

• Demonstrated success coaching and leading teams in a high employee empowerment culture, while training and developing technical skills in others
• Managing and delivering results through projects and initiatives
• Experience utilizing computer programs and Microsoft Office products

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & ABILITIES:

• Ability to travel as required (10-20%)
• Conducts himself/herself with the highest ethical and moral standards
• Learns concepts and new skills at a very rapid pace and applies learning to the job
• Quality and detail driven; unyielding performance expectations of self and others in quality control
• Achieves results fast, individually and through teams - can synthesize data and multiple points of view quickly and creatively to arrive at balanced solutions and has a strong bias for action
• Understands deep and complex scientific concepts and can troubleshoot problems based on abstract data