Roxel Overview

Roxel is an Anglo-French Company that designs, develops, and manufactures a range of solid propellant rocket motors for use in tactical missiles. Its operations are spread across several sites in the UK and France, with an annual turnover of about £250M and nearly 1000 staff, with 300 in the UK.

The UK operations are entirely based at Summerfield, Kidderminster where we now have a requirement for a NPI Quality Engineer. This role offers the opportunity to work on highly complex, safety-critical products while supporting production, continuous improvement, and customer quality requirements.

About the Role

The Quality Department ensures that quality standards for component, subassembly, and product are adhered to throughout the manufacturing process, including in the supplier base. Responsible for effective and efficient support to both project and standard product engineering and manufacturing teams, working within the areas of Product Statutory and Regulatory Compliance, Product Quality, and Reliability. To support our strategic growth plans and continued focus on Operational Excellence, we have identified a need for a New Product Introduction (NPI) Quality Engineer.

As NPI Quality Engineer, you will support the business by deploying the Quality Strategy. Within your role, you will initiate, enable, support, verify, and maintain this strategy. The NPI Quality Engineer is a key role in realizing the Roxel Commercial Strategy of growing core business by improving efficiency, effectiveness, and excelling in service delivery. You will be a self-starter, with a proven track record in managing change across boundaries and delivering a step change in behaviors and results using industry-standard Quality tools.

Effective communication skills will be critical to the success of this role, with the ability to engage with and influence peers and senior stakeholders, raise the bar in quality methods, and bring a pragmatic and data-driven approach to prioritize improvements across the product portfolio.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Embed a right first-time approach into the Product Development Process and Prototype Manufacture with the effective use of quality tools in New Product Introduction (NPI); supporting the NPI activity to achieve results as the business matures through education, effective governance, and achieving stakeholder buy-in of the new process.
• Governance authority on quality elements of the NPI process with key focus on:
  • Gateway approvals
  • Comprehensive engineering drawings and specifications
  • Design Quality methods (including Design For Manufacture)
  • Quality methods for handover to Production
  • Prototype manufacture and control
  • Validation & Verification
• Define KPIs for NPI activities and proactively manage performance gaps aligned to the Roxel Strategy.
• Work with stakeholders to ensure the QMS is accurate and adhered to in relation to New Products and Prototyping (with EN9145 in mind for Defence standards).
• Project manage the quality aspects to NPI and Prototype manufacture.
• Clear and concise reporting about all activities.
• Creating, executing, developing, reviewing, and reporting on product/process qualification testing.
• Initiating, participating in, and supporting improvement efforts to increase the quality of the products we supply and the processes used to produce them using quality tools including DFMEA, PFMEA, Ishikawa, 8D, FMEA, Control Plans, FAIRs, etc.
• Familiar with quality operations like PPAP, APQP, and equivalent.
• Monitoring the quality level of outgoing shipments.
• Monitoring the incoming quality level of externally assembled products.
• Monitoring the current quality by performing Reliability Tests where required and reporting on the results.
• Ensuring that all new products are introduced into manufacture through a robust, risk-based quality planning process.
• Raising quality alerts (like NCR) when encountering nonconformities.
• Assists in fault finding on customer returns, guiding these repairs through production, interpretation of repair outcome, and logging the results. Making simple RGA reporting. Supporting fault-finding process at engineering and/or R&D.
• Independently deciding on small quality deviations during manufacturing processes and ensuring these are documented correctly.
• Reviewing production documentation as work instructions, workflows, traceability forms, etc.
• Ensure any rework is documented and fully evaluated upon completion as per regulations.
• Produce monthly reports showing defects per month, pareto of the top issues, and timing plan for addressing these.
• Produce a weekly/monthly status report for management to understand the current status of activities.
• Undertake other reasonable duties, in line with business needs and objectives, which are consistent and commensurate with the overall purpose of the position.