Operational Excellence Manager

About Kennametal

With over 80 years as an industrial technology leader, Kennametal Inc. delivers productivity to customers through materials science, tooling and wear-resistant solutions. Customers across aerospace and defense, earthworks, energy, general engineering and transportation turn to Kennametal to help them manufacture with precision and efficiency. Every day approximately 8,700 employees are helping customers in nearly 100 countries stay competitive. Kennametal generated $2.1 billion in revenues in fiscal 2023. Learn more at www.kennametal.com. Follow @Kennametal: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Job Title: Operational Excellence Manager
Location: Rogers, AR

Job Summary:

The Operational Excellence Manager is responsible for leading and implementing continuous improvement initiatives at their location and supporting additional Kennametal sites, as needed. They analyze existing processes, identify areas for improvement, and lead kaizen activities to optimize operations and increase efficiency. This position will report to the Sr.OpEx Manager under the Global OpEx department, with a dotted line to plant management to drive alignment, gain support, train personnel, and implement improvement initiatives that build lean culture.

 

 Key Job Responsibilities:

Lean COMPETENCIES

• Develop competencies of all appropriate people of the Site / Plant about :
• 5S & Product respect.
• Reduction of equipment losses.
• Direct Labor efficiency.
• Scrap reduction.
• WIP reduction.
• Lean industrialization.
• VSM.
• To become autonomous in continuous improvement management.
• Manage site OpEx engineer if needed.

Lean STRATEGIES

• Propose to the Site / Plant Manager the internal lean strategy of the Site / Plant.
• Ensure that the lean rules are taken into account in new projects during validation of each phase.
• Help Site / Plant Manager to manage continuous improvement.
• Monitor the whole lean initiative deployment.
• Manage the production productivity improvement roadmaps.

Lean GEMBA ACTIVITIES

• For the 7 fields of competences listed above:
• Deploy lean standards & best practices within the Site / Plant.
• Make sure that lean standards are fully applied on the Site / Plant.
• Detect abnormalities vs. lean standards.
• React to identify root cause and come back to standard.

Lean RESULTS

• Manage the lean budget.
• Manage the results of the productivity roadmap.
• Manage the results of the 7 fields of competencies listed above
• Implement the management of the daily results
• Lead the weekly & monthly results and associated TOP improvement plans.
• Data analysis and reporting

 Group lean CONTRIBUTION

• Develop and share specific expertise with Site / Plant lean Managers of the region.
• Support Global/regional lean Manager for the benchmark of the local knowledge.

 

Highlight the main responsibilities:

Lean COMPETENCES

• Organize trainings for 5S, Product respect, TPM, SMED, Hoshin, STOP SCRAP, VSM, Kanban, Continuous flow, lean industrialization in accordance to Plant / Site priorities.
• Assess the lean standards are applied properly.
• Permanently promote the Lean principles.
• Organize daily meetings with internal Lean network.
• Perform annual professional competences appraisal.
• Validate the annual review of Lean engineer/analyst, if any.