Quality Manager

The Quality Manager oversees all aspects of the business area quality functions ensuring proper deploying and resourcing necessary to execute with excellence across the five Quality Disciplines: [1] Quality Systems & Compliance, [2] Quality Engineering (improvement), [3] Product Testing and Certification, [4] Customer Facing Technical Services, and [5] Transactional Quality (Inspection & Dispositioning). The position requires a strong and influential leader who can drive cultural change in quality thinking / action down to the shop floor.

The Quality Manager must engage other leaders in the organization who are peers or N+1 to ensure Quality processes are supported and sponsored with the same importance and intensity as Safety. The position also develops their team in the skill and ability necessary to achieve excellence in root cause analysis, product containment practices, countermeasure deployment with verification, Quality Wall operation and robust inspection processes and the foundations of TQM and Lean / Six Sigma.

The Quality Manager understands that the role of a quality organization is to support the operation but not ‘own’ the deployment of Quality within the product and processes – this ownership resides with the Operations organization.

• Manages resources who oversee direct integration of Quality Management Systems on the plant shop floor. Ensures organization in plants of oversight are resourced properly to support QMS ownership within the plants. Ensures the QMS is a series of processes and standards that occur in the path of normal work routines and become ‘the way the plant works’, not something extra to do or only a certification required to do business.
  
  Establishes robust quality process layered auditing programs.
• Deploys Quality Engineering (continuous improvement) through plant quality and operational resources to ensure internal and external quality problems are corrected with innovative and viable solutions. The solutions must be verified to ensure they do not backslide. Understands the best solutions are engineered and not administrative. Mistake-proofs the operation.
• Works closely with the Central Quality Technical Services organization to ensure the voice of the customer is heard and issues in the field are properly deployed to ensure Vallourec’s reputation is maintained and that customer-facing quality metric targets are achieved. Ensure that good communication is maintained between the plant, the Central Quality Team and the customer on the status and progress of work related to issues.
  
  Completes 8
  
  Ds with excellence and intent to truly solve reactive problems. Trains team to identify plant quality problems proactively.
• Ensures absolute compliance and integrity within mechanical and chemical production testing processes and builds laboratory systems that remove the human element from data management of lab generated data to the greatest extent possible, using the latest technologies and Community of Practice for testing labs. Ensures the ISO 17025 / A2LA laboratory certifications are living within the labs and deployed properly. Regularly audits the labs to verify testing compliance and data integrity.
  
  Benchmarks laboratory performance in oversight plants to the greater global Vallourec and / or industrial network through round robin and other comparative programs.
• Works to simplify, streamline and improve the function of quality dispositioning processes. Works to build quality into the process itself but improves the robustness of Quality Walls and inspection processes at all needed checkpoints within the product flow. Prevents escapes. Contains non-conforming issues and builds out processes that supports protecting the customer.

• Above all else, must be a result-oriented leader who understands that Quality is not only a culture and way of thinking, but is a technical profession and a connected series of methodologies that, when integrated properly within an operation, generates true reduction in product variation, elimination of defects and definitive market…