Interim Technical Manager

This is a site Technical Manager role, reporting into the MD and sitting on the SLT of a multi-retailer, complex chilled food manufacturing sites, for an interim contract of around 3-5 months

Purpose

• Be an ambassador for Quality and Food Safety by their visible presence on site demonstrating behaviours and always reinforcing our commitment to the highest standards.
• Responsible for managing the Technical Team, ensuring all requisite product safety and quality specifications and monitoring tools are in place.
• To Participate in the development and maintenance of the Food safety and quality culture within the site
• Liaising with internal departments and external customers to implement internal and external specifications with supporting internal documentation. Implementation and completion of internal and external key technical performance indicator reports.

Deputy: Quality Systems Manager / QA Manager

Key Responsibilities\\Measures of Success

Act as mentor to all staff within the department and the wider teams where necessary in championing food safety and quality values

Actively support site events designed to promote standards and awareness of Quality and Food Safety.

Ensure that non-conformances relating to Quality and Food Safety are fully investigated using root cause analysis to define effective corrective and preventive action plans

To ensure that team members at all levels understand their part in achieving departmental operation objectives

Be responsible for the recruit, performance, conduct, attendance, and disciplinary matters for all employees in your team, carrying out back to work returns, disciplinary meetings with the support of your Hr department.

Facilitate own team to achieve the required output in the most efficient manner and build a strong team for future development needs

Coach, support and train your team to ensure they have the right skills to carry out their nominated tasks

Develop and maintain internal relationships with peers in other disciplines to enable cross functional co-operation.

Audit and support site to achieve the requirements of customer codes of practice. Facilitating the rollout of shared learning and best practice

Continual promotion of Food Safety, legality and Quality within the business.

Responsible for preparing the site for and managing audits and visits conducted by customers, statutory bodies, and third-party auditing bodies, ensuring closure on actions.

Use knowledge to provide technical advice and support to the business and its customer and be fully coherent with current/relevant industry.

Pro-actively investigate trends and implement actions that will derive improvements to prevent and if necessary, resolve potential food safety or quality issues

Conduct investigations where pathogenic micro-organisms and/or high levels of spoilage micro-organisms are detected, communicating actions to key customer contacts, and implementing crisis systems where appropriate

Develop and communicate suitable solutions to ensure effective implementation and compliance to new standards/COP’s

Lead drive and provide hands on support to conduct technically challenging investigations of processes and root cause analysis.

Control of food safety through the application of the systematic approach of Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP). To implement control, monitoring and corrective action systems, for the manufacture of all existing products and all new product development. These to be appropriate to the products, processes, and customers, to meet all legal requirements of the business to provide due Diligence Defence

Apply problem solving techniques to resolve operating problems and recommend improvements to maintain operation running costs at a planned level

Must be aware of all business requirements and understand the impact of their decisions

To highlight any potential areas that can reduce cost

Implement the site vision and strategic plans interfacing with all key stakeholders to ensure successful delivery with key objectives and measurement through the Technical team KPI performance indicators

Implement site overhead management control through the technical team with support from other departments

Driving ‘innovation’ in technical processes and quality/food safety control points through alignments to customer critical quality requirements and their key product compliance KPI’s.

Drive key food safety and quality performance metrics internally and externally with robust action plans to achieve agreed targets. Key customer Technical contact championing compliance

Provide an excellent customer service by building strong relationships at all levels of the business.

Provide technical support and information to commercial contacts

Deliver Customer expectations as part of the site Technical Team and Senior Management Team

• Be ambassadors for and promote the culture of Quality and Food Safety by their visible presence on site demonstrating behaviours and reinforcing our commitment to the highest standards at all times
• Participate in external Quality and Food Safety audits and customer technical visits taking the lead within their department or area of responsibility
• Ensure that non-conformances relating to Quality and Food Safety are fully investigated using root cause analysis to define effective corrective and preventive action plans
• Support and be involved in the regular review and achievement of the site Quality and Food Safety objectives

Liaise with suppliers and customers on quality issues