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 continuous improvement across all levels of the organisation, from operators to first line leaders to the site leadership team. You make improvement accessible and actionable for everyone - lowering thresholds, accelerating feedback loops, and ensuring that ideas flow efficiently from the shop floor into sustainable solutions. You actively coach and support teams and first line leaders, helping them develop ownership and problem-solving capabilities as a natural part of their daily work.

Designing learning systems and knowledge architecture.
You develop a modern management system that captures and retains organizational knowledge and ensures improvements are truly embedded (sustainable improvement). You think carefully about how to retain deep process expertise. You design learning journeys that inspire continuous growth and improvement.

Connecting internally and externally.
You are highly present on the shop floor, connecting with people across all departments, building trust, and developing a deep understanding of the processes. Your curiosity drives you to ask “why” and challenge assumptions, fostering a mindset where learning is continuous and improvement is part of everyday behavior.
You build relationships across all departments on site, connect actively with other factories within the group, and engage with the broader operational excellence community in and outside the company. You bring in fresh thinking, best practices, and new ideas. 

What’s in for you?

• You will join our big little family: our associates are the beating heart of our company, they bring the flavour to our organisation. We cherish each member and prioritise their well-being.
• We value you as a person: At Vandemoortele we value each one of our associates and recognise their unique contributions to team successes.
• We care for your future: We believe in the power of our associates and the value of their actions and support their professional journey by offering internal mobility and promotional opportunities. We embrace individual ambitions and entrust our associates to take ownership.
• We make products for you to love: We are a team of passionate food enthusiasts. 

Are you the one we’re looking for?

• You hold a Master degree.
• You have experience in manufacturing, preferably in a FMCG-type environment..
• You have gained strong knowledge of TPM, Lean manufacturing, SiX sigma or equivalent continuous improvement methodologies 
• You have a dynamic personality and excellent communication skills, allowing you to easily connect with all layers of the organisation.
• You communicate fluently in Dutch.
• You demonstrate strong leadership capabilities and you inspire people to adopt new ways of working. You successfully drive change by empowering teams and building ownership across the site.
• You have strong analytical skills and are able to translate KPIs to actions.
• You think in systems, not in incidents. Where others see a recurring problem, you see a process that needs to be redesigned. 
• You are a team player with an open mindset. As an ambassador for Eeklo, you collaborate closely with the site team and operate within a broader network of OPEX leaders across the Vandemoortele Group.
• You are flexible: from time to time, you are willing to make yourself available outside standard office hours to support key initiatives.

Join us in making sweet memories!
We look forward to welcoming you to our delicious journey! Submit your updated CV and compelling cover letter (optional) highlighting your relevant experience and motivation.  For questions, mail us: joselien.neyt@vandemoortele.com