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Continuous Improvement Manager
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Continuous Improvement Manager
We are looking to hire a Continuous Improvement Manager to lead a disciplined, business-wide programme of cost reduction and continuous improvement across sites, identifying opportunities, converting them into practical initiatives, and ensuring financial and operational benefits are delivered and sustained.
The role brings proven manufacturing-style cost initiative discipline into a multi-site service and laboratory environment. It will have a deliberate bias towards measurable savings, lean laboratory working, productivity, standardisation and the removal of waste, while protecting safety, technical integrity, UKAS and management-system compliance, customer service, turnaround time (TAT), capacity and revenue.
This is a hands-on improvement role. The Continuous Improvement Manager will work through operational and functional leaders, using data, observation and structured problem-solving to challenge established ways of working, build robust business cases and maintain pace from opportunity identification through to verified benefit realisation.
Accountability
- The Continuous Improvement Manager owns the improvement method, opportunity pipeline, challenge business-case discipline, programme tracking and assurance of sustained benefit.
- Operational and functional leaders remain accountable for implementing agreed changes and delivering the resulting performance within their areas.
- Finance independently validates financial baselines and realised savings.
- The Head of Compliance sponsors the programme, agrees priorities and supports escalation where barriers cannot be resolved at the appropriate level.
Implementation Strategy
- Prioritise initiatives by recurring business case, i.e. financial value, speed to benefit, investment requirement, operational impact, risk and ease of implementation.
- Translate opportunities into clear charters with baseline, scope, owner, milestones, resources, dependencies, expected benefit and control measures. Track and monitor implementation.
- Use data and direct observation to understand the true causes of cost, delay, variation and lost capacity rather than treating symptoms.
- Ensure genuine P&L savings are differentiated from cost avoidance initiatives, but both are tracked and measured.
- Establish current baselines with Finance and agree validation rules before initiatives are approved.
- Confirm rules for validating savings post-implementation.
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Lean Working
- Review and improve the end-to-end sample journey.
- Apply practical lean methods including 5S, visual management, standard work, value-stream mapping, daily performance control, root-cause analysis and focused improvement events.
- Improve laboratory layout, zoning, point-of-use storage, ergonomics, material and sample flow, work sequencing, batch size, changeovers and hand-offs between teams.
- Identify and remove bottlenecks by balancing demand, people, skills, equipment capacity and maintenance, with clear controls for work in progress and priority samples.
- Extend improvement activity beyond laboratories into field operations, Calibration and central/support functions where there is a clear business case.
- Work with the Head of Planning and Regional General Managers to improve resource utilisation, route density, scheduling, travel, overtime control, job readiness, completion information and operational hand-offs.
- Create practical implementation plans, establish named owners and maintain momentum through regular reviews, disciplined actions and prompt escalation of blockers.
- Test changes at an appropriate scale, measure the result and refine the solution before wider rollout.
Output
- Develop a concise improvement dashboard covering pipeline value, approved benefit, realised benefit, investment, delivery status, overdue actions, risks and sustainability.
- Provide clear, evidence-led updates to the Head of Compliance and leadership, highlighting decisions required and presenting options rather than unsupported opinion.
- Maintain an auditable record of assumptions, approvals, changes and benefits so leadership can rely on the reported position.
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Ideal Qualifications and Experience
- A strong track record of process / continuous improvement experience, ideally gained in a multi-site, manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, or similar industry.
- Proven and demonstrable record of cost-saving project success.
- LEAN experience, ideally Six Sigma belt qualified, including root cause problem solving experience across complex, multi-departmental, multi-site processes.
- Experience of UKAS laboratories, materials testing, calibration, or other heavily regulated industrial facilities.
- Working within ISO/IEC 17025, ISO 9001 or comparable management systems.
- A recognized quality assurance and/or Health and Safety qualification, e.g. CQI, IOSH.
- Excellent oral, written and numerical analysis skills.
- Proven ability to work and interact at all business levels.
- Strong project management experience.
- Experience in a private-equity-backed, high-growth, performance-driven environment.
Personal attributes
- Commercially astute and naturally curious about costs and what value it creates.
- Build trust with laboratories, field and support teams by converting their knowledge into practical change.
- Evidence-led and financially disciplined.
- Constructively challenging, able to influence experienced leaders without creating unnecessary friction.
- Persistent and focused, working at pace against resistance, competing priorities and pressure.
- Simple and proportionate in approach, making improvement easier to understand, own and sustain.
- High integrity, prepared to report setbacks accurately and protect safety, quality and customer commitments.
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