The Operational Excellence Specialist will be responsible for leading optimization initiatives supporting organizational efforts to drive operational excellence. With a strategic and operational focus, the specialist will play a crucial role with leading improvement initiatives and the development, deployment and oversight of program and processes, including tools, methods, training, and systems. The specialist will be responsible for preparing strategic analysis, developing solutions that drive operational excellence and making recommendations to leadership. The role will involve strong collaboration, as the specialist will be leading and serving as a key resource for the business regarding analysis and visualization support, best practice review, overall strategy, improvement and implementation, and ongoing review of performance results.

Key Results:

• Initiate improvement strategies that drive operational excellence performance

• Lead the implementation of operational excellence program initiatives, including tools, techniques and training

• Lead the development of performance reporting and dashboards, empowering stakeholders to make data-informed decisions

• Develop crisp, polished, executive-level presentations that can be used to communicate performance

• Establish strategic and collaborative relationships with key stakeholders

• Support development of organizational continuous improvement competency

• Maintain involvement and understanding of high value best practice (internal and external) that are shared with business partners to enhance quality, compliance, efficiency and safety

Principal Duties and Responsibilities

Lead Operational Excellence Specialist

• Works collaboratively with key stakeholders to understand the needs of the business and develop action plans that support operational excellence

• Analyzes non-conformance trends to evaluate effectiveness of corrective actions

• Leads strategic analysis in key areas to identify trends and provide data-driven insights and actions

• Continuous evaluation of process, data, timeline effectiveness to provide recommendations on increasing effectiveness of results

• Monitor, measure and analyze process performance on a continual basis to identify data-driven opportunities for improvement

• Define, monitor, measure and improve organizational metrics for the organization on an ongoing basis

• Continuous evaluation of process, data, timeline effectiveness to provide recommendations on increasing effectiveness of results

• Present information, influence and facilitate discussion with all levels of the organization, including senior leaders to drive action

• Independently lead workshops and/or discussions with front line workforce, key stakeholders, and leadership to enable decision making and initiate action

• Identify, propose, and lead continuous improvement initiatives

• Serve as a peer coach or mentor to other members of the team to build strategy and improvement capabilities

• Ability to lead directly and indirectly people, projects or initiatives

Required Qualifications for Position

• Bachelor's degree in a discipline related to continuous improvement, business management, data analytics, engineering or other relevant area, or equivalent related experience

• Demonstrated knowledge or experience in strategy, continuous improvement, data analytics, operations, finance, or related functional area

• Proven ability to facilitate multiple projects/tasks while meeting deadlines with quality

• Ability to conduct workshops, influence decisions and facilitate discussions with leadership

• Excellent interpersonal, written and verbal communication skills

• Ability to effectively network and build strategic partnerships, both internal and external

• Ability to apply critical thinking and analysis (forward thinking) to work product

• Strong collaboration skills and ability to promote change

Preferred Additional Qualifications for Position

• Experience with a BI Software and visualization tool, such as Tableau

• Experience interpreting and communicating advanced data sets and analysis

• Ability to develop and communicate key performance indicators and scorecards/dashboards

• Advanced proficiency with databases, statistical analysis tools and/or programing languages such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, R, Python, VBA, Java, PHP, etc.

• Strong leadership skills and ability to influence others

• Certification in Change Management and/or Project Management certification

• Six Sigma certification or experience in continuous improvements

• Knowledge of utility operations (i.e. gas, electric, construction, engineering)

Nisource, Inc.
801 E 86th Ave
Merrillville
Indiana United States
www.nisource.com