Head of Industrial Strategy and Capability

Please note: Automatic promotion is not guaranteed

Dynamic working: 2 days per week on-site, due to workload classification

The Opportunity:

The Operational Excellence was launched in January 2026 with departments to drive industrial performance ramp-up, modularity and re-use, industrial cooperation and delivery of continuous improvement based on agile, lean and digital manufacturing methods.

The directorate is led by the Operational Excellence Vice President (Yannick Roussel) and comprises a multinational team, maximising the use of video conferencing facilities when appropriate, and through dedicated face to face meetings for specific topics, approvals and decisions. The Group Head of Industrial Strategy Cooperation and Offset (Ben Stephens) is responsible for the delivery of the MBDA Industrial Strategy Committee (MISC) which includes senior representatives from key directorates. Decisions from this review influence industrial policy inputs for future bids and identify opportunities on existing Programmes for inter-Natco cooperation, industrial transfers and dual sourcing.

A small Industrial Strategy and Capability team leads the preparation and ex-committee actions progress on behalf of the MISC. This role is to lead the Industrial Strategy and Capability team, based in the UK, but working internationally.

The team’s role in enabling the effectiveness of the MISC is important as this committee will seek to balance tensions across the internal and external supply chains and guide the direction of development in different industrial capabilities in order to support ramp up which is a key element of MBDA’s success.

The environment necessitates that we have a robust and consolidated view of our capacity and the investment required to deliver potential future order in-take. In this role you will also lead the coordination of Group industrial capability planning, enabling overall strategic growth of industrial means, to meet the business demand.

Leading a small international team but interfacing with a wide range of stakeholders across the business.

• Consolidating and maintaining the Group installed end-to-end industrial capability view over the next 10 year time horizon.
• Developing and monitoring the Group industrial current and future capacity plan in line with the ISBP, including national ramp up plans, domestic sovereignty constraints, export and inter Natco cooperation and transfers. This element entails close collaboration with the Manufacturing and Procurement teams to ensure we have a common understanding of the level of capacity currently available and the decision points required to increase in order to ensure we are meeting the schedule for increased production.
• Providing standardisation of approach to capacity analysis across Group both process and tool.
• Taking data from the Group S&OP and internal and external supply chain capacity and capabilities as inputs, and supporting the MBDA Industrial Strategy.
• Understanding national industrial strategies and the relationship to MBDA Group Industrial Strategy.
• Liaising with the Industrial Policy Steering Committee and gathering inputs for industrial policy for Export.
• Acting as the Operations Group Industrial Strategy interface to Procurement and confirming coherency of the industrial policy direction.
• Preparing with your manager the MBDA Industrial Strategy Committee.
• Identifying constraints linked to supply to achieve the business demand, both internally (with Manufacturing) and externally (with Procurement) and addressing through capacity improvement or dual sourcing.
• Along with Manufacturing, identifying opportunities on existing Programmes for inter-Natco cooperation.
• Elaborating action plans to address future tensions with escalation when required (such as sovereign driven actions, high cost impact etc)
• Leading the implementation related to new industry standards assessments such as Aero Excellence in your Natco and coordinating at group level