Technical Service Manager - Northamptonshire

Role: Technical Service Manager (Packaging)

Salary & Bens: circa £45k - Company Car - 28 days holiday plus BH - Pension

Location: Northampton

The Client: Outstanding multi-award-winning flexible packaging manufacturer with more than 50 years’ experience.

Role Summary: Responsible for providing packaging technology expertise, knowledge, advice and leadership to ensure the business meets both its supply and commercial objectives across our customer base.

Key Responsibilities:

• Resolving quality issues and reducing customer complaints.
• Take ownership of customer trials, ensuring timeframes are managed.
• Leading and delivering projects in areas of problem resolution, technical transfer and cost saving.
• Leveraging innovation from Suppliers, Academia, Innovators etc. in furthering the NPD function.
• Supporting our commercial function to resolve packaging issues.
• Providing packaging expertise and knowledge to production sites to drive improvements via materials, equipment and processes to ensure optimal NPD developments.
• Ensuring packaging knowledge and expertise on material science, processes and manufacturing skills/ competencies are transferred within the business.
• Working with the Technical/Lab function to reduce customer complaints and positively impact on our quality performance
• Identifying cost saving opportunities for the business and undertake cost-engineering exercises
• Leading sector innovation initiatives
• Developing and maintaining accurate packaging specifications, ensuring that they are validated.
• Recognise opportunities in applying new technologies, innovation, materials, and processes to deliver competitive benefits that create new sales opportunities.

Ideal Candidate Profile:

• Lean manufacturing, six sigma and related techniques.
• Writing high quality specifications, BOM’s, trial requirements etc.
• Good understanding of packaging sustainability.
• The investigation, data analysis, hypotheses proposal, test generation and trials required to help improve and solve quality/supply problems.

This role covers all flexible packaging types and processes across a wide range of pack formats and brands. Considerable knowledge and experience is required of all these to operate effectively.

This role will also interact with a considerably wide and diverse number of teams both internally and externally at all levels, the ability to work effectively with such stakeholders is critical.

Experience of manufacturing excellence techniques, processes, quality management systems, and problem-solving methodologies would be extremely useful.

Areas of Specialisation: Packaging Technology, Material Science, Engineering.

Knowledge & Experience

• A thorough understanding of flexible packaging, and associated technologies; polymers, papers, inks, functional and decorative coatings
• A good understanding of the interface between the Pack and machinery. The focal point for all packaging related issues and will therefore be expected to troubleshoot any packaging-related issues on our clients’ production lines.  An engineering bias would therefore be an advantage.

Key Skills

• The quick approval, acceptance and control of alternative suppliers/products.
• Clear and authoritative advice and recommendations to Customers and Production sites.
• The ability to recognise opportunities in applying new technologies, innovation, materials, and processes to deliver competitive benefits.
• The capability to independently manage a high level of multiple projects, where they are all important and urgent, on-time and to budget with the appropriate level of engagement.
• Shares learnings between production sites obtained from active participation in issue investigation and resolution.
• Ability to solve significant technical issues and develop robust action routes to move towards