Operational Excellence Manager

Operational Excellence Manager

Vandemoortele

Izegem, Belgium

Role description

As Operational Excellence Manager, you are the driving force of the continuous improvement culture that is already well-established – and that you will take to the next level of performance. Operating on a strong foundation built over years, you will both safeguard what has been achieved and actively push the organisation towards the next maturity level. In a factory that has been recognized 3 times as a Factory of the Future, your role goes beyond implementing tools – you shape how the organization thinks, learns, and improves. Your role has a plant-wide scope, supporting all departments across the site, including safety, quality, production, maintenance, logistics, HR, and beyond.

You operate at the intersection of strategy and the shop floor. By deeply understanding our processes and systems, you identify opportunities to move from problem-solving to problem prevention, and from implementing changes to designing systems that continuously generate improvement. You translate Operational Excellence into tangible business impact, linking initiatives to performance, cost, and long-term value creation.

Your key responsibilities and challenges are

Embedding a low-threshold improvement culture.

You cultivate continuous improvement not only through structured kaizen events and root cause analysis, but through the everyday habits of every employee. You lower the barriers to raising improvement ideas – making it easier to capture, act on and embed small improvements without barriers. You coach first line leaders, managers and operators to initiate and close improvement cycles themselves, shifting ownership firmly to the shopfloor.

Data leadership and digital intelligence.

You bring strong digital and data affinity, leveraging data analysis, structured problem solving, and emerging technologies (including AI) to stabilize, optimize, and identify improvement opportunities. You leverage data analysis to Six Sigma methodology to centerline processes, methods and machines.

Designing learning systems and knowledge architecture.

You develop a modern management system that captures and retains organizational knowledge and ensures improvements are truly embedded (sustainable improvement). You think carefully about how to retain deep process expertise. You design learning journeys – including the DOJO training infrastructure – that make standing still feel uncomfortable.

Strategic value creation.

You connect operational excellence directly to business outcomes. You further develop cost deployment, build the case for investment where it matters, and ensure that KPI improvements are visible and meaningful at the leadership level.

Sustaining and advancing operational standards.

You are the guardian of what has been built: 5S+S, kaizen, communication systems, audit routines, and standard-setting processes. You create feedback loops that bring results directly to the people on the floor, and you hold the organisation to its own standards – not by policing, but by designing systems in which slipping backwards becomes visible immediately.

You lead or actively contribute to the vertical start-up of new production lines and technologies, ensuring they achieve targeted performance levels and operational standards within the expected timeframe.

Building capability across the organisation.

A key part of your role is to strengthen and embed a culture of continuous improvement across all levels of the organization, from operators to first line leaders to the site leadership team. You make improvement accessible and actionable for everyone – lowering thresholds, accelerating feedback loops, and ensuring that ideas flow efficiently from the shop floor into sustainable solutions. You actively coach and support teams and first line leaders, helping them develop ownership and problem-solving capabilities as a natural part of their daily work.

Connecting internally and externally.

You are highly present on the shop floor, connecting with people across all departments, building trust, and developing a deep understanding of the processes. Your curiosity drives you to ask “why” and challenge assumptions, fostering a mindset where learning is continuous and improvement is part of everyday behavior.

You build relationships across all departments on site, connect actively with other factories within the group, and engage with the broader operational excellence community outside the company (e.g. lean lead network, factory of the future). You bring in fresh thinking, best practices, and new ideas. As a benchmark site within the group, Izegem takes the lead in developing new initiatives, which you proactively drive and share across the business line and even groupwide. You are comfortable piloting new approaches and scaling what works.

Your profile

• You have a Master degree;
• You have experience in a production environment;
• You have experience in continuous improvement and lean methodology. A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certification is a strong asset;
• You have strong analytical skills and are able to translate KPIs to actions;
• You are empathic, dynamic and communicate well with all layers of the organisation;
• You move fluidly between shopfloor, project and management teams;
• You think in systems, not in incidents. Where others see a recurring problem, you see a process that needs to be redesigned;
• You are a team player and connect well in the factory, the company and to other companies to learn;
• You are flexible: from time to time you are willing to visit the night shift for gemba walks and communication, and to visit other sites within the Group.