Direct Hire | Retail | Boise, Dallas, or Phoenix | Apply Now –
POSITION SUMMARY
The Director of Lean Transformation is a strategic and visionary leader responsible for driving the long-term vision and strategy, process, performance management and overall execution of Lean program within the Retail Operations team. They will lead a Lean Transformation team of 2 managers and 2 analysts.
Their primary focus will be on:
- Putting people first by driving better team member experience
- Being customer driven with focus on higher guest satisfaction
- Raising the bar with better efficiency and performance
This is an amazing opportunity for someone to come to the initial stages of our client’s Lean journey and shape it from end to end. This role will give you visibility at all levels within the organization and make a significant, transformational impact on our operations strategy, culture, and day-to-day processes.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
Drive Lean initiative identification and delivery
- Collaborate with Corporate Retail Operations team, Division and Front-line teams in stores to drive continuous improvement (often based on principles of ‘Lean’) in store operations; this includes identification, design, testing, implementation, and measurement of initiatives.
- Oversee Lean idea collection from Field teams and manage vetting process to continuously fill initiative pipeline.
- Lead Lean Transformation Team through waves of store department reviews (e.g., kick-off, observations, ideation, design and testing, stakeholder engagement, training development, rollout, implementation follow-up, remediation)
- Usher initiatives though standard delivery path from ideation to implementation across network of ~2k stores
- Partner with Learning & Development team to ensure training is updated, maintained, and completed by applicable Field teams.
- Act as a problem-solving partner for Corporate team and Field teams as they seeks to identify new initiatives and generate greater impact, faster
- Continuously identify initiatives roadblocks or delays, define actions needed to unblock and follow up to ensure “course correction” problem solving as needed to keep initiatives on track.
Performance manage program and provide transparency to management
- Deliver reporting on program and initiative performance to management team
- Present/support preparation of program updates for key stakeholder and executive-level meetings (e.g C-suite meetings)
Lead ‘Lean Transformation’ program delivery
- Lead the weekly ‘Lean Transformation Team’ (LTT) cadence and drive operational performance management (e.g., work with Field teams and Finance to track and manage operational metric performance for initiatives and manage Lean initiative pipeline)
- Coordinate activities of initiative owners (LTT analysts, Field team members and Retail Operations team members) to ensure smooth operations of program and collaborate with Store Initiative Portfolio Management (SIPM) team
- Collaborate with Finance to ensure financial reconciliation of program impact and forecasted impact.
- Issue standard and ad-hoc reports on performance of program and initiatives; direct analysis as required.
KEY QUALIFICATIONS
- Undergraduate degree required in Finance, Strategy, Operations Management, Industrial Engineering, Operations Research; MBA preferred
- 10+ years of experience of crafting long-term operations strategy, managing and delivering large scale complex business change and/or continuous improvement programs ideally in a retail setting
- Past experience in a corporate strategy or consulting role helping large organizations transform their retail operations with a proven success record of winning the hearts and minds of customers and associates, balancing delivery of productivity and growth
- Knowledge of ‘Lean’ or continuous improvement methodologies and how they are applied in operations to elevate customer and associate experience and unlock significant productivity
- Ability and passion to spend time in stores learning about the operations, people, culture to identify and solve for opportunities. Success of this role will depend on making meaningful changes at the store level
- Broad understanding of working of various departments in a retail organization (other than operations) e.g., merchandizing, finance, HR, real estate etc., the ability to sell your vision to them and bring them along on this journey
- Ability to build strong network across the organization at both Corporate, Division and store level,
- Excellent people-management, negotiation, presentation, and executive-level communication skills
- Adept at strategic thinking, problem solving, with sound business judgment and strong analytical skill
- Positive and proactive process management with an eye for detail and a strong challenger mentality
- Experienced in Microsoft Office applications (i.e., Excel, PowerPoint)
- Ability to travel up to 30%
