Sr Manager, Supplier Engineering

Company Description

It started with a simple idea: what if surgery could be less invasive and recovery less painful? Nearly 30 years later, that question still fuels everything we do at Intuitive. As a global leader in robotic-assisted surgery and minimally invasive care, our technologies—like the da Vinci surgical system and Ion—have transformed how care is delivered for millions of patients worldwide.

We’re a team of engineers, clinicians, and innovators united by one purpose: to make surgery smarter, safer, and more human. Every day, our work helps care teams perform with greater precision and patients recover faster, improving outcomes around the world.

The problems we solve demand creativity, rigor, and collaboration. The work is challenging, but deeply meaningful—because every improvement we make has the potential to change a life.

If you’re ready to contribute to something bigger than yourself and help transform the future of healthcare, you’ll find your purpose here.

Job Description

Supplier Engineering’s mission is to ensure supply continuity for purchased parts at the lowest landed cost.  The Supplier Engineering (SE) organization comprises of 3 functions.

• Supply Chain Engineering: Partners closely with the Global Supply Chain (GSC) Organization. Builds supplier process excellence and global tooling to grow spending with preferred suppliers to > 80%, and to reduce cost
• New Product Introduction SE: Partners closely with the New Product Launch team. Takes a new product from Go-Active, to Product Launch and completes the required stabilization metrics (FMR) to transfer to the Plant SE team. The Final Manufacturing Review (FMR) exists to ensure components are manufacturable, scalable, at the lowest landed cost, and of the highest quality.
• Plant SE: Partners closely with Plant operations organization. Ensures smooth and efficient scaling of the business for our sustaining products and supports the transfer of new products into those facilities.

The successful candidate will develop and lead a team of New Product Introduction Supplier Engineers.  Key Objectives of this role are:

• Build trust with the cross-functional NPI teams (GSC, DE, ME, QE, PM). Act as the Supply Chain (GSC and SE) voice.
• Reduce design-related issues in production.
• Ensure smooth scale-up during product ramp.
• Lowers total cost and supply chain risks by mitigating risks upstream.
• Develop and qualify capable processes with suppliers for new parts, assemblies, and finished products.
• Stabilize the supply chain, to transfer new products to the Plant SE Team

The value to the business is high-quality purchased parts that meet requirements, new product development timelines, and ensuring smooth scale-up and transfer to sustaining manufacturing.

Essential Job Duties:

Lead a team of supplier engineers who deliver value to the business through the following activities.

• Supply-chain Strategy: Develop and execute a global supply-chain strategy and roadmap for a long-term, sustainable, and resilient supply-chain to support Intuitive’s Product strategy and roadmap.
• Supplier Selection: Conduct market research to identify trends in your commodity area and accordingly select and evaluate suppliers to enable Agility and innovation during New Product Introduction, and to enable production scale globally for products that reach broad commercial launch. Establish a strong partnership with the NPI sourcing team to incorporate commercial viability in the supplier selection process.
• Supplier Development and collaboration: Drive and adopt new technologies and automation in the supply chain to achieve high efficiency and production scale. Champion best practices like DFX, Lean, SPC, Six-sigma, Project management, in the supply chain. Establish clear communication channels with suppliers and manage both technical and business relationships
• Supplier Performance and Monitoring: Partner closely with suppliers to select optimal mfg process and process controls to achieve high quality and cost performance. Develop effective KPIs to monitor supplier performance (delivery, capacity, cost, quality). Execute projects towards continuous improvements of KPIs.
• Supplier Compliance: Partner with Supplier Quality team to drive audit finding resolution with suppliers through processes like CAPA and SCARs to maintain compliance with QMS requirements
• Supplier Risk management: Partner with Global Supply Chain and Design Engineering teams to identify various risks within the supply chain and implement mitigation measures.

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