Associate Director, Supply Chain Development - Hydration (Chicago, Illinois)

This job is with Kraft Heinz, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.Manage the day-to-day activities of the Continuous Improvement team that leads and supports process improvement and business analysis practices throughout the organization. Develop, manage, and maintain a clear vision and objectives in building, maintaining and enhancing a comprehensive continuous improvement and business analysis service offerings.
Responsibilities: · Lead commercialization effort for scoping new business opportunities across the Hydration Platform in the HDM business unit. Ensure effective team engagement with the manufacturing location, R&D, supply planning, and engineering.· Ability to scope and execute large capital investments to either enable Innovation or drive bottom line savings across the KSB team with annual budget greater than $40 Million . · Ability to execute Innovation projects to enable top line growth for HDM of over $100 Million . · Ensure appropriate capacity for new business initiatives and growth plans across product life cycle. Develop and recommend alternatives as needed. Provide updates to project sponsors and stakeholders as needed on key initiatives, including progress against deliverables, cost management, next steps and needs from sponsors to alleviate hurdles. Escalate concerns and issues, report project fact base, define options/trade-offs, and provide team recommendation.· Lead internal feasibility assessment and business case to support business team's scoping requests; Identify impact across the supply chain with regard to cost of goods sold e.g. route to market, capacity utilization, DIOH, manufacturing efficiency, quality, safety.· Help develop and assess assigned financial targets, to include the delivery of capital requirements, trial activity and start-up expenses. Drive development of preliminary COGS, ensure alignment between category team and operations. Engage and support productivity related scoping projects to deliver cost reduction targets.· Partner with External Manufacturing managers and EM procurement to deliver against scoping activities outside of current Kraft Heinz capabilities. · Support Business and Manufacturing Systems initiatives as required, and support the continuous improvement of the commercialization process through collaboration with key stakeholders and best practice sharing.· Execute major manufacturing cost improvement initiatives through cross functional collaboration and updates to senior leaders via KHBM.

• Lead and/or participation in various stakeholder governance forums (i.e. Stage gate/Leadership teams)
• Partner with the Business Units/ Manufacturing/ Supply Chain/ Engineering to develop a 3 year strategic capacity plan. Create innovative solutions to address GAPs/ Constraints.
• Provide indirect leadership for the PCM organization and Plant commercialization leads.

· Work hand in hand with Supply Chain Losses team to get ahead of potential losses and help drive risk mitigation once it is identified through 30-90 day risk report and 90-180 reports by leveraging cross functional team (Sales/Marketing) to find alternate uses for the product. · Give direction to the Productivity team, specifically for Manufacturing year over year project savings.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Operations Management, Food Science, Chemistry, or other related field
• Minimum of 10 years combined experience in manufacturing, supply chain, engineering or HQ business team experience.
• Minimum 5 years' experience in Project Management for Consumer Products
• Minimum 3 years' experience in Basic Marketing/Finance Principles
• Minimum 3 years' of Plant Manufacturing experience