Continuous Improvement Manager

Unilever; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 52,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

A global consumer goods company is seeking a Supply Chain CI & TIO Manager to lead continuous improvement across Southern Africa’s customer operations. The role involves close collaboration with partners and the Performance Delivery team to enhance process efficiency. Candidates should have a degree in Supply Chain, IT, or Finance, and demonstrate strong leadership capabilities and an agile mindset. Join a diverse team that thrives on inclusion and innovation.

Qualifications

• Strong business acumen and customer centric mindset.
• Experience in leading diverse teams and managing performance.
• Ability to connect with external stakeholders effectively.

Responsibilities

• Lead continuous improvement initiatives across all customer operations.
• Drive performance management and ensure effective adoption of processes.
• Serve as point of contact for global process excellence teams.

Skills

Agile mindset

Change management

Team collaboration

Education

Degree in Supply Chain, IT, or Finance

Job description

Function: Supply Chain

Work Level: 2B

Reports to: Head of Performance Delivery – Africa & NAMET

Scope: Africa & PTAB

Location: Southern Africa, East/West Africa, Turkey or India

Terms & Conditions: Full time

About Unilever

With 3.4 billion people in over 190 countries using our products every day, Unilever is a business that makes a real impact on the world. Work on brands that are loved and improve the lives of our consumers and the communities around us. We are driven by our purpose: to make sustainable living commonplace, and it is our belief that doing business the right way drives superior performance. At the heart of what we do is our people – we believe that when our people work with purpose, we will create a better business and a better world.

At Unilever, your career will be a unique journey, grounded in our inclusive, collaborative, and flexible working environment. We don’t believe in the ‘one size fits all’ approach and instead we will equip you with the tools you need to shape your own future.

Category / Function Introduction

UniOps is focused on transforming the way we work to create exceptional experiences across Unilever’s wider ecosystem encompassing markets, customers, employees and partners. Through leveraging connected technology, third‑party partner skills and expertise and reimagining our processes we will ultimately unlock growth and ensure a superior customer and employee experience.

As the scale and pace of our transformation increases, we are establishing a new team to drive capabilities with our partners and ensure excellence in service delivery to markets.

This is a new and exciting opportunity to play a role in delivering performance for Customer Operations to Southern Africa markets & categories. The CI & TIO Manager role sits within the Performance Delivery Team which will work with our Southern Africa Markets & Categories and selected partners (including Genpact and / or Capgemini) to deliver value across all customer operations activities from deliver, planning, CD Excellence through to collection of cash. The team will focus on ensuring end to end processes, enabled by key technologies and ways of working across this eco‑system to deliver value and better business outcomes.

Job Purpose

Find your purpose at Unilever. You will lead innovations, big and small, that will make our business win and grow. You will learn from brilliant business leaders and colleagues in a truly global and diverse culture to ultimately become a better you.

This role will work closely with the Performance Delivery Lead, Manager and Partner; accountable for the delivery of continuous improvement across all pillars. Focal point to lead continuous improvement on the performance management of day‑to‑day delivery at scale in collaboration with our partners. This role is responsible to connect with both the L3 UniOps team and market Customer Operations team to drive the adoption, execution and continuous improvement of iOps capabilities/enablers.

What Will Your Main Responsibilities Be

Owns execution and adoption of capabilities & enables roadmap across pillars within the geography in coordination with global PEX, IT, Country Performance Delivery Manager, and Country iOPS team

• Address adoption issues and outside system work‑arounds
• Work with global PEX, and IT teams for any CR requirements
• Benchmark usage and effectiveness relative to other sites / markets
• Drives process‑based / capability‑based governance and benchmarking within geography
• Ensure assets are maximised before any small tech or auxiliary automations are developed to support operations

Owns continuous improvement agenda in collaboration with partners & country

• Drives governance to ensure right prioritization of initiatives across markets
• Ensures CI agenda of partners is aligned to U Ltd priorities, roadmap, framework
• Cross pollinate learnings / experience from within organization into our partner operations
• Identify Best Practices – External and Internal. Explore emerging trends and actively seek
• opportunities to simplify, eliminate, automate, consolidate, centralise.

SPOC for global process excellence team into the geography

• Drives prioritisation of C&E execution within the geography in alignment with global team
• Represents markets within geography in global process / capability discussions and community of practices

Drive effectiveness and consistency of operating model (governance, gate‑keeping, etc).

Experiences & Qualifications

What You Will Need to Succeed

• Degree: Supply Chain, IT, Finance
• Business acumen and customer centric mindset
• E2E function agnostic integrator (non‑silo mentality)
• Holding people accountable (peers, leaders and external stakeholders) and strong personal accountability for delivery
• Team leadership experience
• Experienced in leading/working with virtual teams and driving performance across diverse mixture of culture

Skills

• Demonstrable Agile mindset and capabilities
• Ability to drive change
• Ability to work effectively in both independent and diverse multi‑task team environments

Leadership

• You are an inclusive motivator of people. Your team deliver with real passion, growing and learning from each other whilst delivering quick wins.
• You are still responsible for your own results and as a manager, you also need to motivate others to deliver with passion, creating an inclusive and engaging climate around you. You can balance challenge with support and coaching. You understand the wider business context and you are emotionally intelligent enough to motivate people to deliver what is needed.

Unilever Behaviours

• Focus on What Counts: We ruthlessly prioritize what really, really matters, and so do fewer things brilliantly.
• We set clear & stretching goals and recognise maximum performance impact.
• Care Deeply: We care deeply about how consumers experience our brands every day, everywhere; our people’s growth and development, our impact on the planet.
• We care about our performance, to a point where it hurts when we don’t win.
• Stay Three Steps Ahead: We think boldly and creatively to make breakthroughs in performance.
• We are always curious and confident - anticipating and staying ahead of consumer needs and external trends to beat the competition.
• Deliver with Excellence: We deliver everything we do, with excellence and pace.
• We take personal ownership and hold each other to account - always finding a way to do what we said we will do.

Unilever embraces diversity and encourages applicants from all walks of life! This means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development of all employees regardless of age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, marriage and civil partnership, and pregnancy and maternity.

Unilever is an organisation committed to equity, inclusion and diversity to drive our business results and create a better future, every day, for our diverse employees, global consumers, partners and communities. We believe a diverse workforce allows us to match our growth ambitions and drive inclusion across the business. At Unilever we are interested in every individual bringing their ‘Whole Self’ to work and this includes you! Thus if you require any support or access requirements, we encourage you to advise us at the time of your application so that we can support you through your recruitment journey.