Lean Manager

Job Description

Division Specific Information

Clinical Trials Division (CTD) partners with pharmaceutical and biotech customers around the world to ensure the right patients get the right therapies in the right doses at the right time – a concept that we internally adopt as “There is a Patient Waiting.” Our outstanding blend of services includes project management, packaging, distribution, transportation management and specialty logistics, ancillary supply management, clinical supply optimization, bio-repository storage and much more. Our more than 3000 employees in over 15 countries work hard every day knowing that what they do matters.

Position Summary:    

The role will facilitate implementation of the Practical Process Improvement (PPI) Business System at CTD Japan to enable profitable growth, improve quality and customer experience, and increase employee engagement. The position collaborates in partnership with key partners to continually improve the site culture and performance through the deployment of the PPI Business System model. The role involves supporting the site leadership team in critical metric leadership, facilitating the lean fundamentals such as kaizen methodologies, visual management, tiered accountability, gemba and more sophisticated lean tools such as value stream mapping etc. This role also has responsibility for role modeling our PPI Business System through ownership of the PPI productivity metric (savings) including project funnel coordination and site PPI critical metric management. It also involves developing individual and interpersonal capability in these areas by training and coaching site leadership, individuals and teams through daily activities and structured events.

Job Responsibilities 

• Leads the development of the PPI culture by using various methodologies and tools such as lean manufacturing, waste reduction, cycle time assessment, value stream analysis, & labor utilization.
• Facilitate development of critical metrics/tiered accountability with the site leadership team.
• Work closely with site leadership and PPI steering committees to identify and complete project funnel and accelerate the culture change vital to drive profitable and sustainable growth.
• Builds relationships with CTD Japan leaders to understand the business objectives and priorities and develop supporting improvement initiatives.
• Respectfully champion an action-biased culture of continuous improvement to improve critical metrics, in the areas of customer, finance, people and quality.
• Develops a deep understanding of Thermo Fisher manufacturing sites’ capabilities.
• Stays abreast of new developments in business process improvement methodology and best practices, including learning from other sites, market leaders and industries.
• Acts as an internal consultant and role model for the sharing and implementation of PPI standard processes.
• Lead/work with functional teams to stabilize and streamline processes to improve the customer experience, enable profitable growth and become more efficient.
• Provide support to develop problem solving capability within the organization at all levels.
• Train, mentor and develop teams to ensure system improvements are sustained and the partners are running the processes independently.
• Help teams identify new projects through kaizen deployment, value stream mapping, data analysis and daily management systems.
• Coordinate the project funnel to keep an ongoing queue of projects to meet productivity goals.
• Develop Process Manager capability and capacity to support local project needs.
• Lead PPI productivity savings reporting process in partnership with Finance.
• Work with the expanded Division team to develop/promote/standardize the PPI Business System further.
• Assists in the knowledge sharing and training of staff on PPI principles.
• Ensure compliance with environment, health and safety and security policies and procedures, rules, signage and instructions at all times

Qualifications: 

• Lean Six Sigma: Black Belt
• Business Level English & Japanese
• Experience in Manufacturing/Warehouse/Supply Chain-Logistics Industry preferred