Manager, Continuous Improvement and Equipment Maintenance

By joining Bio-Techne, you’ll join a company with a powerful and positive purpose of enabling cutting-edge research in Life Sciences and Clinical Diagnostics. Bio-Techne, and all of its brands, provides tools for researchers to further treat and prevent disease worldwide.

Position Summary: 

Bio-Techne is looking for a Manager, Continuous Improvement and Equipment Maintenance at our Minneapolis, MN campus.  This is a key role responsible for optimizing existing equipment, team leadership and support of Director, Continuous Improvement in identifying process and equipment changes to enhance quality, yield and throughput. 

You will lead a team of skilled equipment technicians to optimize current machine operating time, ensure unplanned disruptions are addressed immediately, ensure documentation consistent with QMS and lead efforts that are focused on process improvements in yield and service delivery advancements.   

We are highly complex manufacturing site focused on liquid and lyophilized proteins, antibodies and immunoassays, you will engage and lead Kaizens, Value Stream current / future state processes with Operations, Quality Control, and Research & Development teams.  Success in this position requires the use of a variety of skills to identify, analyze and implement opportunities for improvement within our laboratories for cell culture, protein/antibody purification, immunoassay reagent preparation, as well as the complete production cycle from production to shipment. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead a team of technicians completing calibrations, PM’s and emergency equipment repairs. 

• Develop an automation road map for the processes covering RUO/IVD and GMP business 

• Improve the key department metrics of On-time PM and Calibration completion by 20 % YOY  

• Improve the OEE on identified Bottling equipment from its current state by 20% YOY. 

• Lead root cause analysis on equipment failures, develop improvement and control plans 

• Leadership and collaboration in process and equipment related to line transfers and new production introductions.  

• Responsible for creating vision for factory automation in progressive years. 

• Responsible for development of a highly technical team focused on equipment performance enhancement.  

• Interact with vendors and service providers. 

• Develop standard work procedures for training and operations. 

• Develop methods to minimize change over time and reduce downtime. 

• Identify improvement initiatives to variability reduction, equipment down-time, lead time reduction and waste elimination. 

• Coach and mentor Technicians in lean philosophies to complete scheduled maintenance and enable an environment that identifies and eliminates barriers 

• Champion Kaizen events document via VSM (Value Stream Mappings) existing processes, identify fail points and develop solutions. 

• Responsible for improvements on improved organizational productivity/operating efficiency and service delivery to our customer base. 

• Create an environment of continuous learning by conducting lessons-learned events that identify root cause of performance failure and assist team in long-term corrective actions.