Quality Assurance Manager in Chorley

We are a manufacturer of pet care, personal care and household products that helps brands and entrepreneurs achieve great things by creating outstanding products and offering unparalleled services.

We use our experience as brand owners of the market-leading pet care brand, Animology, to offer our customers an exceptional full-service development, manufacturing, and fulfilment solution, and we do it with passion and enthusiasm.

Role Description

To lead and continuously improve Quality Assurance across Group55, ensuring the Quality Management System is embedded, effective, compliant and audit-ready.

The role is responsible for driving quality governance, maintaining industry accreditations, managing quality risks and customer requirements, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, accountability and right-first-time performance across the business and supply chain.

Responsibilites

• Own and lead the Quality Assurance strategy, quality governance framework and QMS improvement roadmap for Group55.
• Maintain current and future external accreditations, ensuring the business remains audit-ready and that actions from audits are controlled, visible and closed effectively.
• Set quality standards across the business and ensure they are translated into clear procedures, work instructions, training, checks and performance expectations.
• Lead NCR, CAPA, root cause investigation and complaint management processes, ensuring corrective and preventive actions address the true cause and prevent recurrence.
• Provide customer-facing quality support for complaints, investigations, CAPA responses and corrective action updates, ensuring responses are factual, timely, evidence-based and aligned with customer expectations.
• Review customer requirements and ensure they are understood, implemented and maintained in conjunction with relevant managers and functional leads.
• Lead supplier quality activity, including approval, onboarding, quality agreements, questionnaires, performance review and supplier audit requirements.
• Own the quality element of SQDMC routines, ensuring quality risks, defects, complaints, right-first-time performance, audit actions and improvement priorities are visible and acted upon.
• Develop and report quality KPIs, trends and risks, ensuring managers have clear visibility of performance, weaknesses, escalation points and improvement priorities.
• Support change control by assessing quality impact, implementation readiness, validation requirements and post-change effectiveness.
• Support the accreditation roadmap by defining the quality systems, controls, evidence and routines required before the business pursues additional schemes.
• Drive continual improvement activity that reduces waste, improves right-first-time performance, strengthens compliance and supports customer service.
• Remain actively involved at the point of issue when required, initiating cross-functional support, helping teams remove blockers and ensuring actions progress through to completion.
• Provide senior leadership to the Quality team, setting clear expectations, developing capability, coaching effective problem solving and creating a culture of accountability and professional standards.

Personal Attributes/Skills

• Strong working knowledge of Quality Assurance, Quality Control and Quality Management Systems within an FMCG, manufacturing, personal care, cosmetic, pharmaceutical, food or similarly regulated environment.
• Experience of managing certified systems and external audits, ideally including ISO 22716, ISO 9001, COSMOS, Soil Association, B Corp or comparable customer/accreditation standards.
• Relevant quality qualification or equivalent senior-level practical experience in a quality assurance leadership role.
• Knowledge of SQDMC, KPI routines, visual management, daily escalation and structured problem solving would be advantageous.
• HACCP, Lean, Six Sigma, auditing or root cause investigation training would be advantageous.
• Strong communication, influencing, decision-making, report writing and stakeholder management skills.
• Competent user of Microsoft Office and business systems used to manage documents, actions, data, audits and KPIs.

We’re dedicated to ensuring Group55 is a great place to work, we love what we do and we want to work with great people who love what they do too.

We have a happy and inclusive workplace that offers support and development opportunities for our people to continue to achieve their best.

This role will be office-based in Chorley, Lancashire, working 37.5 hours a week, Monday to Friday. Group55 offer a company profit share bonus after a qualifying period.

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