Manager - Manufacturing Excellence & Digital Transformation

Overview

Lead the Manufacturing Excellence agenda across Foods India, accelerating deployment of the Unilever Manufacturing System (UMS), productivity improvement, capability building and technology-enabled improvement across the Foods manufacturing network.

What you'll do

• Lead the Manufacturing Excellence agenda and accelerate deployment and maturity of UMS across Foods India.
• Establish a continuous-improvement culture focused on systematic identification and elimination of manufacturing losses.
• Strengthen performance management and problem-solving routines across factories.
• Drive sharing and replication of best practices across the Foods manufacturing network.
• Build and drive the manufacturing productivity roadmap across the Foods network.
• Identify structural opportunities across labour, assets, conversion cost, waste and manufacturing processes.
• Partner with factory leadership and Finance to create improvement pipelines and translate opportunities into sustainable business results.
• Establish benchmarking across sites and use internal and external best practices to raise manufacturing performance.
• Develop a common framework for manufacturing performance and loss intelligence across Foods sites.
• Drive structured interventions on chronic losses and performance gaps.
• Strengthen the use of data analytics and data-driven decision making in manufacturing.
• Enable factories to move from reactive issue resolution towards predictive and preventive performance management.
• Partner with Engineering, Digital and site teams to identify opportunities where digital technologies, automation and analytics can unlock manufacturing value.
• Build scalable use cases around productivity, reliability, quality, process control and shop-floor decision making, and ensure successful solutions are standardized and replicated across the network.
• Drive initiatives that improve manufacturing responsiveness while balancing service, inventory and controllable cost.
• Partner with Planning and factories to strengthen operating flexibility and responsiveness to changing business requirements.
• Build Manufacturing Excellence capability across site leadership and manufacturing teams.
• Develop practitioners and champions in UMS, problem solving, loss elimination and data-driven manufacturing.
• Create an active Foods Manufacturing Excellence community to accelerate cross-site learning and replication.
• Partner with Sourcing Units, Engineering, Planning, Quality, SHE, Finance, Procurement and Digital/IT to deliver the Manufacturing Excellence roadmap.
• Influence stakeholders across factories and central functions to accelerate execution and remove barriers.

What you'll need

• Strong manufacturing or operations experience with a demonstrated understanding of factory performance.
• Experience in Manufacturing Excellence, Continuous Improvement, UMS/WCM/Lean or equivalent performance-improvement systems.
• Strong analytical and structured problem-solving capability.
• Ability to translate factory losses and operational data into actionable improvement programmes.
• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills across factory and central teams.
• Ability to operate across multiple sites and drive improvement through influence rather than direct authority.
• Strong bias for action, execution and sustainable results.

Nice to have

• Experience across one or more of manufacturing, engineering, operations excellence, digital manufacturing or supply-chain transformation.
• Exposure to automation, digital manufacturing and manufacturing analytics.
• Experience leading cross-functional transformation programmes.
• Engineering, Supply Chain or Operations education; a postgraduate management qualification would be an advantage.

Details

• Location: Mumbai HO.
• Req ID: R-1190517.
• Function: Supply Chain – Manufacturing.