Head of Continuous Improvement

What’s in it for you

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work.  These include but aren’t limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme of up to 45% of base salary
• Car allowance of £7,320 per annum
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (plus 8 Bank holidays)
• On-site state of the art gym at our Welwyn Campus with discounted “Gympass” membership & free health checks via Nuffield Health
• Retirement savings plan - save between 6% and 10% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Life Assurance - 5 x contractual pay
• Share Schemes – Join our ‘Buy As You Earn’ & ‘Save As You Earn’ share schemes after 3 months service
• Colleague Clubcard (including a 2nd card for a family member) after 3 months service
• Colleague Discounts:
• 10% increasing to 15% after every pay day for a four day period, off most purchases at Tesco (from April 2020)
• 10% off One Stop
• 10% off pay monthly & SIM only deals with Tesco Mobile
• 20% off all F&F purchases
• 20% off car, pet and home insurance at Tesco bank. T&C’s apply
• 25% off Tesco Café
• 50% off complete glasses purchases & free eye tests (other offers available) at Vision Express
• 50% off health checks at Tesco Pharmacy
• An exclusive deals and discounts website saving you money on everyday purchases, treats for the family, eating out and utility bills for the home
• Health screening every 2 years
• Private medical insurance offered by Bupa
• Cycle to work scheme
• Shuttle Bus Service to/from Hatfield & Welwyn Garden City Station to Welwyn Campus & Hatfield Offices
• Opportunities to get on - take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training, to help you achieve the job and career you want
• Our Employee Assistance Programme helps you deal with life’s challenges
• Financial wellness - Tesco has partnered with experts to help you make the most of your money
• Get involved in a range of fundraising activities with our long-term charity partners

About the role

Head of Continuous Improvement (CI) is the single point of accountability for the deployment and development of a Continuous Improvement practice and culture across Tesco Group, driving the capability from Tesco Business Services; an integral part in leading the people, customer and the transformation agenda. This includes our Value Stream Improvement, Continuous Improvement and Process Improvement capabilities.

The role supports the strategy to create a customer centric CI culture across Tesco, embedding improvement principles in the operations as well as expanding up to wider Tesco organisation, across value streams and end2end customer journeys.

To deliver this, the Head of Continuous Improvement is expected to operate regularly at Tesco Senior Management (CEO, MDs, HRDs) and Business Unit Director level, whilst engaging and working across the organisation hierarchy. They will be responsible and accountable to set and evolve the CI strategy and priorities, whilst driving Tesco-wide adoption of world-leading CI principles, ensuring alignment between customer experience, operational excellence and cost transformation perspectives, deploying and sustaining CI across teams in line with this strategy, engaging and coaching the leadership teams to reinforce CI and build a CI deployment pipeline, coaching and supporting the delivery coaches on their CI interventions, reporting and tracking of the maturity and benefit levels across CI interventions, growing the CI capability within wider Tesco, and identifying E2E customer journey opportunities which can be driven through CI.

You will be responsible for

• Working with senior leadership and management to determine the strategic priorities for CI deployment and other interventions in line with customer and business challenges
• Partnering with respective cross functional stakeholders to identify and deliver deployments, ensuring alignment with Customer Experience and Transformation goals.
• Developing and sustaining all 3 Value Stream, CI and Process Improvement programmes at Group level
• Sustaining CI deployment roadmaps across Tesco Business Services to achieve full coverage and engagement over UK, Central European and India based teams
• Developing and delivering new Group wide CI programme, leveraging the Tesco Business Services Centre of Excellence to enable
• Defining a strategy which outlines requirements both during CI deployment, and wider organisational mechanisms, roles and behaviours which need to be in place to truly embed and maintain a CI culture
• Defining and delivering the pathway Enterprise wide maturity for all TBS business units
• Defining and building direct CI team resourcing requirements in line with deploy and sustain strategies
• Leading and managing CI Coaches – including core performance management duties and professional standards
• Intervening where appropriate to work with coaches and managers to help them resolve complex issues that would otherwise prevent full benefit delivery
• For all CI tracking and reporting of benefits through the hierarchy
• Sustaining CI post wave and supporting the Business units to consistently deliver year-on-year benefits

Business Impact

• Directly enabling business strategy and culture objectives
• Continued CI maturity with balanced benefits across people, customer experience and cost
• Ensure that processes are continually optimised to deliver value year on year

You will need

Educational:

• Accredited at Expert level in Lean or Black Belt Six Sigma certified
• Accredited in managing large change programmes
• Extensive experience gained at a senior level in CI rollout and process transformation
• Minimum 2:1 degree

Key Skills:

• Proven strong leadership and management capability; ability to inspire and develop a high-performance culture and to grow talent
• Ability to lead, influence and deliver results at Leadership Team level and in a fast paced, matrixed environment
• Experienced coach, with an ability to empower individuals and teams to think for themselves, and proven leadership capability
• Recognised Subject Matter Expert in CI with extensive practical experience with Lean/ Six-Sigma programmes/ deployments, Lean ways of working and coaching leadership in role modelling the respective behaviours.
• Excellent communicator and well developed interpersonal, negotiation and conflict resolution skills
• High degree of change orientation, willingness to challenge current thinking in constructive ways which build support and develop new approaches to complex issues
• Previous experience of senior level stakeholder management
• Strong commercial, financial and analytical skills, working with the business to identify practical, performance improvement opportunities
• Relevant experience with complex programmes and driving impact from these programmes

About us

Our vision here at Tesco is to become every customer's favorite way to shop, whether they are at home, out shopping, on the move, anywhere in the world.

Our core purpose is ‘Serving our shoppers a little better every day’.

Our business was built with a simple mission – to be the champion for customers, helping them to enjoy a better quality of life and an easier way of living. This hasn't changed. Customers want great products at great value which they can buy easily and it's our job to deliver this in the right way for them.

In the UK, we serve some 66 shoppers every second, so it's our goal to ensure every one of those customers experiences just a little better service on each visit.

We want our customers to be inspired and whatever they are looking for, we’re finding bigger and better ways to provide it.

We need people who share our ambition to deliver for our customers; passionate and confident people willing to take the initiative and drive us forwards. In return we offer excitement, a great team, an excellent benefit package and significant career development opportunities.

If that sounds exciting then we'd love to hear from you.