Opex Leader

**Share our taste for life!** Together with you, we want to achieve this mission. We value you as a person and actively support you on your professional journey, while caring about your future. Join our big little family and let’s make products for you and the world to love. Do you share our taste for life? **Your role** As Operational Excellence Manager, you are the driving force of the continuous improvement culture, and you will push the organisation towards the next level of maturity and performance. Your role goes beyond implementing tools, you shape how the organisation thinks, learns, and improves. Your role has a plant-wide scope, supporting all departments across the site, including production, maintenance, safety, quality, logistics, HR, and beyond. You operate at the intersection of strategy and the shop floor. By deeply understanding our processes and systems, you identify opportunities to move from problem-solving to problem prevention, and from implementing changes to designing systems that continuously generate improvement. You translate Operational Excellence into tangible business impact, linking initiatives to performance, cost, and long-term value creation. **This role is based in our production site in Eeklo.** Eeklo is one of Vandemoortele's pastry production sites, with three state-of-the-art production lines. Our team of approximately 200 colleagues delivers a wide range of high-quality frozen bakery products to customers across Europe. The combination of scale, product complexity, investment in technology makes Eeklo a dynamic environment where improvement never stands still. **Your key responsibilities and challenges are:** Embedding a low-threshold improvement culture. You cultivate continuous improvement not only through structured kaizen events and root cause analysis, but through the everyday habits of every associate. You lower the barriers to raising improvement ideas, making it easier to capture, act on and embed small improvements without barriers. You coach managers, first line leaders and operators to initiate and close improvement cycles themselves, shifting ownership firmly to the shopfloor. Sustaining and advancing operational standards. You are the guardian of the standards that have been built: 5S+S, CIL, kaizen, communication systems, audit routines, and standard-setting processes. You create feedback loops that bring results directly to the people on the floor, and you hold the organisation to its own standards, not by policing, but by designing systems in which slipping backwards becomes visible immediately. Strategic value creation. You connect operational excellence directly to business outcomes. You bring strong digital and data affinity, and you turn data into actionable insights. You are the driving force behind loss eradication programmes. Building capability across the organisation. A key part of your role is to strengthen and embed a culture of contin