Business Excellence Manager

The Opportunity

This position works out of our North Chicago, IL location in the Core Lab Division. Our diagnostic solutions are used in hospitals, laboratories, and clinics around the globe.

The crucial information derived from our tests, instruments and informatics systems are often the first step in patient care decision making for hundreds of health conditions from heart attacks to blood disorders to infectious diseases and cancers.

As the Business Excellence Manager, you'll beresponsible for creating and leading the advancement of Operational Excellence principles and practices across the site through internal & external collaborations, delivering high impact sustainable business results.

What You’ll Work On

This is not a remote opportunity.

Must be able to travel up towards 20%

Establish, coordinate, and provide leadership for the Business Excellence program within the plant. Responsible for assuring program and project integration with the Business Unit’s Business Strategy efforts and meet the guidelines, criteria and metrics established by the Business Unit Presidents.

This individual will have a significant impact on both Plant and Operation budget and cost reduction goals. They will lead the most complex and highest impact projects available in the plant.

This individual should be a current or future candidate for Department Manager as well as a prime candidate for the Business Excellence Program Manager position.

Responsible for leading the site's Operational Excellence initiatives, including but not limited to the following : 5S Program, Gemba Program, Class A and Shingo methodology.

Drive for transformational change by engaging personnel in the usage of Operational Excellence tools & methodologies thereby extending their usage.

Deliver Lean Sigma projects according to the DMAIC process that will improve our ability to meet customer.

expectations, improve quality, reduce cycle time, and reduce costs. Coordinate the improvements with senior.

Management, appropriate project teams and Process Owners to ensure projects are integrated with the business strategy, other business processes and improvement projects.

Support and promote other Operational Excellence practices for example Shingo should the business desire.

Perform Internal and external benchmarking to measure success and identify improvement opportunities for the site.

Lead the Business Excellence program within the plant and effectively coordinate projects with the deployment champion and other improvement project teams.

Lead projects, identify opportunities, define, and financially justify projects, launch project teams, use good project management to manage team activities, lead teams to execute projects with the problem-solving methodology, track project and program status and results, remove and elevate project barriers, and develop team members.

It is also critical to identify integration issues with other projects / processes and coordinate the improvements with the appropriate project / process owners to accomplish the project goals.

Manage the development and maintenance of methods and enabling systems that measure the degree to which the program goals, objectives and metrics are being met.

Provide deployment champion with the results and recommend appropriate corrective action.

Address program requirements necessary to support constantly changing priorities, responsibilities, and organizational ambiguities.

Recruit Experts, Advocates and Team Members into the Business Excellence infrastructure, and ensure continuing development of their skills.

Take an active role in educating visitors to the plant on BEx methodologies and participate in multi-divisional councils that shape the future of Business Excellence at Abbott.

Organize and lead Business Excellence training for plant personnel.

Ensure projects are integrated with other business activities, improvement projects, and business strategies.

Ensure open 2-way communication throughout the organization for Business Excellence.

This includes keeping the Deployment Champion, plant staff and Operations management informed of program status and ensuring coordination of activities between Black Belts at other sites inside and outside of Abbott Nutrition.

Also, this includes capturing project lessons learned that could be re-used for other projects.

Identify and, if needed, design value stream and project metrics and key performance indicators (qualitative and quantitative) to measure improvement success.

Perform other work-related duties as assigned.

This position operates with only general direction and minimal supervision from the site Operations Manager and has full responsibility to make decisions that directly impact BEX plant goal achievement.

Demonstrated highly developed facilitation skills, ability to resolve conflict. Background

of successfully leading large cross functional projects or programs. Ability to translate strategies into practical goals.

Demonstrated experience as a change champion / change agent that led a functional team through a large organizational change.

Practical knowledge of modern operational excellence tools and programs such as Lean

manufacturing, Six Sigma, Class A, and similar methodologies.

Required Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree is required or extensive equivalent experience.

5+ years of experience across the areas of manufacturing operations, manufacturing support systems, quality operations, project management, or continuous improvement functions.

Experience leading improvement teams required.

Candidate should be an Abbott certified Black Belt or should possess the skills to obtain such status.

Should have thorough knowledge of Abbott manufacturing and planning processes or external equivalents.

Should have solid project management skills and team leadership skills.

Should have knowledge of other functions that provide inputs regularly, i.e., Research and Development, Purchasing, Manufacturing, Engineering, and Operations.

Must have the ability to do statistical analysis and serve as a statistical subject matter expert.

Preferred Qualifications

Bachelor’s Degree preferably in Engineering, Business or Supply Chain Management

MBA with emphasis in Operations or Quality Management a plus.

Prior supervisory experience is a plus.