Continuous Improvement Manager

Continuous Improvement Manager

$86,250 to $140,250 per year

Full-time, on-site in Fort Worth, Texas

Apply for this job →

About the role

We blend, bottle, and can distilled spirits and ready-to-drink cocktails for the biggest beverage-alcohol brands in the world, names you’d recognize from any back bar. Four lines run under one roof, two bottling and two canning, across two shifts. What runs on them changes constantly: a bottled whiskey this week, a canned cocktail the next.

Shift managers run the floor and a planner runs the schedule. This seat is pointed at the lines themselves: the changeovers, the startups, the stops, and the hours they take. With a product mix like ours, that is where the next big gains are, and this is the first role we’ve built to go after them full-time.

It’s a new role and it reports to the founders. Two other roles sit in the group with you, a Controls Engineer and a Process Improvement Specialist. Depending on what you bring, you lead them from day one or you grow into it. We’d rather fit the seat to the person than hold out for a resume.

What you’ll do

• Know where the hours go on all four lines. Run time, stops, changeovers, rejects, by line and by shift. Start from what the leads already record and build it into one picture, in a form that holds up at the end of a long night. The output is a number the founders see every week: where the hours went on each line, and what you’re doing about the biggest one.
• Take the changeovers apart. With our mix, changeovers are the biggest lever in the building. Film them, time them, move every step you can to before the line stops, stage the parts and tooling, and write the sequence down with the crew that runs it. Then run it until the new time holds on a shift you aren’t standing on.
• Kill the repeat stops. When a line keeps stopping for the same reason, say a capper that jams or a labeler that drifts, you lead the root-cause work with the lead, maintenance, and quality. A month later you go back and check the fix held. If it didn’t, you reopen it.
• Decide which standards exist, and whether they hold. Your Process Improvement Specialist writes the procedures and checklists and teaches them at the line. You decide which ones matter most and which lines get them first, then you compare the written time to the real time. When they don’t match, you look at the standard first.
• Keep a ranked list, and make the case for the money. A short list of what’s worth fixing, with the hours or the dollars next to each item, that you bring to the founders. A lot of fixes cost nothing. Some need a part, a conveyor change, or real capital, and then you write the ask, get three quotes, and own the project through install and startup.
• Lead the group. A lot of these fixes come down to a program change or a new sensor, so you set what the Controls Engineer takes on first. Line leads learn the methods by working real problems next to you. Over time the floor handles its own small fixes and your group spends its weeks on the big ones.

What it takes

• You have personally made a line or a process measurably faster or steadier, and you can walk us through the before and after numbers, because you did it and not because you oversaw it.
• You can build the tracker yourself, this week, in Excel or Sheets. No IT project.
• You get people who don’t report to you to change how they work. Usually by showing them at the line that the new way is easier.
• You write short and clear: a one-page sequence, a capital ask, a project summary the founders can read in two minutes.
• You’re diligent in your own work. You get three quotes before you spend money. You ask questions until you understand the problem, which sometimes means asking the same one twice. And you’ll say no to a project that hasn’t earned its spot.
• You’re on the production floor for much of the day, with regular time on second shift.

Either end of this works: an engineering degree and a couple of years, or six or eight years of doing this on packaging lines without one. Tell us which you are and we’ll scope the seat to it.

Helps, but not required: high-speed bottling or canning · filler, capper, and labeler mechanics · Lean or Six Sigma training · a TPM or autonomous-maintenance rollout · capital project management · PLCs and HMIs · spirits, wine, or beer · Spanish.

It doesn’t have to have been a bottling line. If you’ve cut the turnaround on an aircraft, the ticket times in a kitchen, or the load-in and load-out on a tour, and you can show us the numbers, we want to hear from you.

Compensation

$86,250 to $140,250 per year depending on experience, plus a discretionary performance bonus. PTO, medical and dental. Full-time, salaried, on-site in Fort Worth. You’ll be in early for first-shift startups and on second shift regularly, and you set your schedule around the floor, not a desk.

Why join Very Good

• We have fun doing cool stuff. You’ll work on industry-leading alcohol innovation projects with brands people know around the world. Your friends will be impressed.
• Nearly every manager in this building started here at entry level. We promote from within and we cross-train on purpose. The time you win back is the most visible work in the building, and the founders read it every week.
• Well-scoped improvement work gets funded. If the numbers hold up, we pay for the people or the equipment it takes.

Apply

About 20 minutes on our website. The application opens in a new tab. Apply for this job →