Operational Excellence People Process Lead – 6-month FTC

Railpen•Darlington, SC

10d•Hybrid

About The Position

Railpen is undergoing a period of significant change and is evolving. Adopting Operational Excellence across all People-related processes and touchpoints is fundamental to achieving strategic objectives, enhancing organizational performance, and delivering value across the business. The Operational Excellence People Process Lead will focus on understanding current processes and related process gaps, identifying opportunities to simplify operational processes, improve efficiency, and drive continuous improvement across the end-to-end colleague lifecycle, ensuring alignment to business priorities and the delivery of a high-quality colleague experience. Working alongside People Operations, People Partnering, Talent, and Reward Teams, this role will undertake a review of current people operations processes and implement stronger working practices, ensuring Workday supports streamlined ways of working. As a member of the People team, the role will ensure people design decisions are evidence-based, outcome-focused, and support organizational performance, colleague engagement, and culture.

Requirements

Proven experience in Operational Excellence, continuous improvement and Business Process Improvement
Experience leading process redesign and optimization initiatives across HR, Shared Services, or other business functions.
Strong understanding of process improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, DMAIC, PDCA, or Agile.
Ability to analyze complex processes, identify root causes and implement sustainable solutions that deliver measurable business outcomes.
Experience with Workday, particularly in HR and/or enterprise process environments.
A collaborative and pragmatic style, balancing pace, care, and organizational outcomes.
Exceptional communication, facilitation and interpersonal skills, capable of building relationships across all levels of the organisation.

Responsibilities

Lead an end-to-end process improvement initiative to increase process efficiency, reduce complexity, and improve operational performance.
Analyze current people processes, identify bottlenecks, and design sustainable solutions that deliver measurable results.
Facilitate workshops and stakeholder sessions to map current and future-state processes.
Develop and maintain process documentation, standard operating procedures, and governance frameworks.
Partner with teams across Finance and IT to ensure Workday workflows and system capabilities support optimized people processes.
Design an Operational Effectiveness Dashboard to define, monitor, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure process effectiveness and identify further improvement opportunities.
Apply continuous improvement methodologies such as Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, or similar frameworks to drive business outcomes.
Support change management activities, including stakeholder engagement, training, and adoption of new processes and ways of working.
Promote a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence across the People function.
Identify an escalation process, risk-based with the appropriate control points.