Operational Excellence Manager

JOB PURPOSE

The Operational Excellence Manager leads end-to-end improvement across the licensing and facilities sales funnel in an economic-zone context. By combining shadowing, data analysis, and stakeholder engagement, the role diagnoses bottlenecks to reduce TAT, eliminate rework and lift productivity. Findings are converted into prioritized initiatives with clear governance, targeted automation, and measurable impact on SLAs, capacity, and conversion.

This position will drive cross-functional collaboration with stakeholders in strategy, sales, finance and operations to advance the maturity of RAKEZ's Operational Excellence capabilities.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Process Deep Dive: Sales Funnel & Operations:

• Map end-to-end flows from lead to onboarding and service activation
• Shadow teams to capture AS-IS process, handoffs and digital touchpoints
• Quantify cycle time, wait time, WIP and failure demand to reveal TAT drivers
• Build swim lanes and value-stream maps to expose constraints and rework
• Prioritize fixes by impact, feasibility, risk and time to value

Stakeholder Engagement & Governance:

• Run interviews and shadowing with stakeholders like Sales, Registration, Compliance, Finance, Facilities, IT
• Align problem statements, success metrics and delivery cadence
• Facilitate workshops to co-design TO-BE flows and service standards
• Socialize quick wins and manage a steering rhythm with owners

Data & Insight Development:

• Translate observations into metrics on demand, volume, productivity, utilization, leakage and FTR
• Analyse TAT distributions and queues to find bottlenecks in processes like registration, compliance checks, payments, verification etc.
• Coordinate to build BI dashboards for SLA adherence, aging backlog, productivity, utilization etc.
• Convert insights into hypotheses, business cases and clear calls to action

Taxonomy, Capacity & Root Cause:

• Break processes into tasks; tag value-added vs non-value-added; flag elimination or automation candidates
• Quantify work volumes by task; compute utilization and availability to model capacity and constraints
• Run 5 Whys and fishbone to isolate delay and rework drivers
• Recommend streamlining, load balancing and staffing or automation levers

Improvement Delivery & Benefits Realization:

• Define TO-BE designs, SLAs, entry-exit criteria and control checks by step
• Deploy digitization and RPA with training, comms and adoption metrics
• Track impact on median/P80 TAT, FTR, capacity, conversion and aging; publish dashboards
• Embed continuous improvement with metric reviews, countermeasures and owner accountability

QUALIFICATIONS, EXPERIENCE, & SKILLS

Educational Qualifications:

• Bachelors in business, Operations Management, Engineering, Mathematics or related field
• MBA or relevant master's preferred
• Lean Six Sigma training or certification a plus

Professional Qualifications:

• Strong grounding in Lean, VSM, RCA, swimlanes, control plans
• Proficiency in advanced Excel and BI tools such as Power BI
• Working knowledge of CRM processes and workflows, ideally Salesforce
• Familiarity with process/task mining, RPA or workflow automation platforms
• Solid documentation skills for SOPs, SLAs and governance artifacts

Required Experience:

• 6-10 years in operational excellence or process improvement in B2B services or sales operations
• Proven delivery of TAT and productivity gains across cross-functional teams
• Hands-on in stakeholder interviews, workshops and change management
• Experience building dashboards, KPIs and benefits tracking
• Track record of running pilots and scaling improvements

Other requirements:

• Clear communicator with executive presence
• Strong facilitation and negotiation skills
• Structured problem solver with hypothesis-driven approach
• Comfortable with ambiguity and fast iteration
• Experience in agile or stage-gate delivery environments preferred