Vice President, Operational Excellence

Get started on an exciting career at Element!

Element employees make a difference in the lives of others every day. We are re-defining the fleet management industry to be people first, then business – delivering on our promise of a superior client experience. This takes hard work and innovation, and we need more like-minded people on our team.

Role Overview:

Serve as the leader responsible for success in our mission to improve quality and efficiency across our Global Operations. This role provides the critical independent thought leadership and oversight of 1) Operational Capacity planning, 2) Operational Performance Measurement, 3) Process Engineering & Client-Centric Design, 4) Process Automation, and 5) Global Labor planning. This role works independently but in close partnership with the product and operational leaders to define the operational capacity needed to achieve our targeted service levels and to support the continued digitization and automation of our processes, ensuring efficiencies are realized in financial plans, while also ensuring our growth in operational expenditures are backed by disciplined and rigorous process and productivity analysis.

Operational Capacity Planning

• Develop and implement best in class workforce management policies, processes, models and develop business plans for workforce management operations, including budget development/adherence.
• Direct multi-site WFM team in all aspects of Workforce Management including Forecasting, Capacity Planning, Scheduling, and Real Time Management for over 800 frontline FTEs across multiple business units, sites, and channels, representing over ~30% of the company’s employees.

Operational Performance Measurement & Business Intelligence

• In partnership with the operational leaders establish and maintain data driven performance scorecards for all operational roles and processes, up to and including team senior leadership.
• Curate, own, and steward, in partnership with the Data & Analytics team, the operational production and performance data ensuring the highest quality of accuracy and timeliness to support effective performance management and business decision making.

Process Engineering & Client-Centric Design

• Establish a high performing team of professional process engineers credentialed in the disciplines of Lean, Six Sigma and Change management.
• Deliver engagements that have a direct, material, and measurable impact to operational efficiency, revenue and/or NPS. It is critical this high-powered team is always focused on the most impactful initiatives that will drive our organization forward.
• Be the voice of our client in all design work ensuring we are engineering our processes around our clients and seeking to always exceed their expectations while achieving the highest possible levels of operational efficiency.
• Be the champion for intelligent automation leveraging the best automation tools at all times.
• Be thought leaders in business architecture by providing thoughtful guidance and challenge to operational leadership ensuring operational teams are structured in measurable ways to ensure client experience and quality delivery are embedded in process design and role incentive structures.

Process Automation

• Lead the team of business analysts and intelligent process automation developers to execute high-impact automations.
• Ensure a robust governance structure and ongoing oversight and management of all in-production automations, including performance monitoring.
• Ensure successfully implemented automations are mapped back to operational capacity planning.

Global Labor Planning

• Provide executive oversight of all 3rd party labor usage across the COO division. This includes:
• Maintaining an active relationship with 3rd party outsourcing firm leadership such as Genpact
• Holding approval authority for authorizing any new 3rd party labor engagements and providing recommendations to the COO to proceed or not with 3rd party labor request.
• Identifying in partnership with HR all 3rd party labor currently in use across the COO division and assessing the level of performance and quality of the 3rd party labor output.
• In partnership with the broader leadership team, lead the creation of a vision for the COO global labor footprint including defining the targeted team locations, remote, onsite, and hybrid and hold the pen on establishing the team strategy for realizing the target model.
• Critical to success here will be balancing the attractiveness of labor arbitrage opportunities with best practices in team dynamics, effective performance management, and availability of talent.

Supervision & Influence

Total size of organization: ~37 H/C)

Direct reports (7):

• Director, Process Engineering
• Director, Operations & Genpact
• Director, Workforce Management
• Manager, Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
• Manager, Business Intelligence
• Director, Business Solutions
• Black Belt

Requirements

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree required; master’s degree preferred.
• 15+ years of Operations performance management, business intelligence experience across a variety of operations.
• Experience leading continuous improvement teams in a large corporate environment.
• Deep knowledge of performance measurement tools and methodologies ideally having implemented performance measurement in a variety of operating teams.
• A deep connection to understanding and analyzing the drivers of client experience and architecting processes to be client-centric in their design.
• A high degree of comfort in automation tools and overseeing technical resources sufficient to ensure high output at a high quality.
• Experience in services industries is highly desired; Six Sigma Black Belt certification required; Master Black Belt certification a plus.
• Experience negotiating contracts and managing 3rd party vendors ensuring terms result in common incentives for both parties while also ensuring 3rd party outputs are highly measurable and deliverables are tracked with high accountability.
• Willingness to travel as needed on a global scale with frequent travel to US regional offices to provide boots on the ground leadership and participation in delivering on the mandate.

Knowledge and Competencies

• This is a hands-on, roll up the sleeves, executive role with a high degree of relationship management. To be successful the leader will need to deeply root themselves in learning what’s critical to quality from our client’s lens, understanding the complex ecosystem and the unique value Element brings to our clients through our People, our processes, and our technology, and then guiding the broader COO team to a high state of maturity as we scale our business as efficiently as possible.
• This position will also stand between the senior product leader and the senior operations leader and provide the critical independent insight rooted in quality data and analysis to support data driven decision making in both product innovation and operational service delivery.
• Demonstrated history of successful change implementation and implementing of operational excellence improvements.
• Customer empathy, ability to relate, build strong relationships internally across stakeholders is a must.

What’s in it for You

• A culture of innovation, empowerment, decision-making, and accountability
• Comprehensive health and welfare benefits that serve the needs of you and your family and foster a culture of wellness
• Additional benefits and amenities, including paid time-off programs (vacation, sick leave, and holidays)

Applicants will be required to undergo a background check only if and after a conditional offer of employment has been extended.

Element Fleet Management and its wholly owned subsidiaries are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. We are pleased to consider all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender identity, age, sex, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, Aboriginal/Native American status, protected veterans’ status or any other legally-protected factors. Disability-related accommodations during the application and interview process are available upon request.