The Interim manager
reLean's interim managers are instantly able to take place in the management team to provide consistency during a transition period or add exceptional depth in functional areas to boost a certain function. Our interims are usually overqualified for the roles they take - A prerequisite to ensure a smooth interim transition as the interim manager must hit the ground running to provide quality in the roles they take. Our interim professionals have experience from all Industries, both manufacturing and service ops.
When to use an interim manager?
Our clients predominantly uses interim managers for 3 types of situations:
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Cover for a leaving manager. Often the leaving manager is asked to leave on the day or leaves within 3 months, and the recruitment process typically takes 6 months until the new manager starts and 3 additional months before he/she is running at reasonable speed
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Provide functional capability in an area of development. When a company lacks capability in a certain function, interim managers can be excellence alternatives offering the opportunity to both instantly provide capability but also help develop and coach a younger talent to take over the role
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Provide additional capacity to drive change during intense periods of improvement, problem solving or capacity growth. When companies requires short-term capacity, but may long term wish to improve processes to the extent that a permanent recruitment would have been surplus the interim roles provide excellent alternative.
Operations Manager
Our interim managers are not only great leaders with wast experience in operations that will instantly lead your operations with a customer first mindset. They have a wide register of functional skills too, that can be used to develop particular areas of your operations. Interim operations managers is a great asset when needing to take difficult decisions to transition the organisation as their neutral outside in perspective and long experience takes away any clouding of judgement for decision making.
Lean Manager
Our Lean managers are great at what they do and in high demand with our clients. Set them on improvement work and they instantly save much more than they cost. Regardless if you need one manager to ensure consistency in improvement work during a transition phase, or want several more managers to boost the progress of improvements, our Lean managers are exceptionally skilled and trained in Lean and Operational excellence with multi-industry experience. The best-practice perspectives an interim Lean manager can provide, having seen many companies and industries, is another great bonus from interim Lean managers. We ensure our Lean managers have the right skills in 5S, standard work, operator and preventive maintenance, quality and jidoka, just-in-time, production planning, transformation work, coaching, performance management and problem solving.
Supply chain or Logistics Manager
The top down perspective and project-type engagements in supply chain roles makes it really applicable for interim positions. When you launch a new product, make structural changes to your supply chain or develop a function in a certain region it is unlikely that your own team already has the best capability and experience. We provide interim managers with industry, geography and function expertise, allowing you to benefit from a project leader that 'has done it before' for the project that lies in front of you.
Procurement Manager
As with the Lean managers, our experienced Interim Procurement managers are able to deliver more savings than they cost pretty quickly making it possible to use them both for interim transitions to cover a leaving manager and to boost the current spend reduction initiatives. With a TCO approach and long experience of factual negotiations, category management, supplier base consolidation and in some cases even tear-down work we are proud over the large amount of impact our Procurement managers have provided over the years.
COO, VP Operations, VP Supply chain
With some of the most experienced leaders in operations in our network we are able to provide senior leaders that seamlessly takes charge of your operational divisions.
Having had most operations roles imaginable before achieving the more senior roles, they provide depth in skills and experience able to not only steer the ship during a short transition period but also make a mark on the operations strategy going forward. Often our clients keep the Interim professional a longer time even when the new recruitment have been installed to drive ear marked special projects forward using their experience.
Factory Manager
Most of our team originally spawns from assembly and manufacturing operations at companies like Toyota. Our network in providing interim managers to lead operations environments is strong and we often provide candidates that combines the operations leadership with spike skills in Lean or Quality allowing them during the engagement to also provide functional expertise in improving the KPIs for the area they manage. As always with interim managers, our Factory managers have usually held operations manager and more senior roles in the past. We focus on three types of Factory managers;
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General Factory managers with broad experience in management and production
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Assembly managers, with functional expertise in manual assembly of products
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Manufacturing managers, with function expertise in machine utilization, OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) and TPM (total productive maintenance)
Quality Manager
Our Interim Quality Managers are hands-on problem solvers. Although they are well aware of ISO and management systems, we have focused on building a network of modern Interim Quality Managers focused on customer experience and built-in-quality.
Our Interim Quality Managers works with processes both in manufacturing and service operations ensuring they are Right First Time, preparing for a smooth transition to digitalisation of the processes without large amounts of rework. They are of course skilled in six sigma, practical problem solving, 7 qc tools, containmeint, in process control and all the other tools in Quality control and quality assurance.
Supplier Quality Assurance Manager
Over time we have developed an exceptionally strong network of Supplier Quality Assurance and Supplier Development Managers with spike in PPAP (production parts approval process) and Crisis problem solving. Our network, with a large part coming directly from the supplier development and management team at Toyota, are based throughout the world and can with short notice support challenges you have with local suppliers anywhere. We have helped customers solve crisis situations in Turkey, China, US, and Eastern Europe being able to handle both the local language and the industry specific challenges. This unique and premium service often means our experienced team of experts at reLean take part in the ongoing coordination of the efforts.