Continuous Improvement Leader

Wabtec•Kansas City, MO

3d•Onsite

About The Position

Shuttlewagon, a Wabtec Company, is looking for a Continuous Improvement Leader that will be responsible to create, develop and sustain the Lean Initiatives for the business unit. This role will work with leaders from various departments as well as customers to ensure the factory is operating in the best way to ensure quality, safety and efficiency. As a member of the Components Division, you will be responsible ensuring the business operates at optimum efficiency with an emphasis on costs savings from our operations team.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree from an accredited university or college.
At least 1-3 additional years of experience leading teams in a lean transformation(s) where both lean leadership and change management up, across, and down through the organization was demonstrated.
Experience and ability to influence thru influence, coaching, mentoring and teaching.
Ability to foster lean development with a “hands on” and showing by doing approach.
Demonstrated a deep faith in Toyota Production System (TPS) principles of servant leadership, connecting to the customer(s), building capability from the worker performing standard work and through the organization, and problem solving with the customer and worker always top of mind.
Experience implementing and developing teams to implement pull systems.
History of leadership thru influence, coaching, mentoring and teaching.
Ability to foster lean development with a “hands on” and showing by doing approach.
Deep faith in lean and its principles with a proven track record leading in a TPS type transformation and business operating system transformation…. much beyond a lean-six sigma tool type continuous improvement initiative.
Strong oral and written communication skills and demonstrated interpersonal and leadership skills.
Clear thinker, able to analyze and resolve complex problems.
Demonstrated ability to lead programs / projects ensuring buy-in from key stakeholders in a matrix environment at all levels.
Established project management skills, experience documenting, planning, and stabilizing programs
Ability to work effectively across functions; extensive experience leading cross-functional or geographically dispersed teams, proven mentoring and coaching abilities, ability to motivate & inspire others

Nice To Haves

Preferably more experience.

Responsibilities

Develop the Lean team to grow their lean knowledge and execution capabilities.
Mentor them to be true agents of change, improving their change management capabilities and ensure rigor around conducting the kaizen events.
Create the lean vision and continuous improvement strategy to advance the customer experience through improved cycle time, on-time delivery, and ensure all other customer critical to quality areas are at the forefront of the strategy.
Change agent responsible for delivering performance excellence through execution of lean initiatives and providing thoughtful coaching of the functional standard work and problem solving.
Be comfortable influencing leaders in lean methodology and principles, Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment), problem solving, etc.
Ensure compliance with standard processes and tools, supports the value stream team to develop and follow their personal standard work (leaders and associates), yielding a culture of system, process and behavior discipline to get results.
Implement and help improve the Business Operating System known as the Wabtec Management System
Ability to teach and develop team on quick improvement cycles; these quick developmental opportunities will build team confidence; in turn this will give us the ability to drastically increase our velocity of change.
Lead all plant operations through lean process and behavior changes, developing highly effective Daily Management processes focused on tools such as basic problem solving (5 why’s), kaizen, A3 thinking, value stream mapping, Kanban visual management, pull processes, creation of flow and adherence to standard work.
Convey a passion for continuous improvement while effectively communicating the next future state while reinforcing buy-in throughout the improvement journey.