Quality and Continuous Improvement Specialist

General Information:

The Quality and Continuous Improvement Specialist will be responsible for coordinating within NAM the product and systems reliability requirements in alignment with the Global Product Reliability Program initiatives. This individual will be responsible for ensuring proper and timely coordination for the resolution of both warranty and after sales product and equipment failures, serving as the liaison between the Service Team in NAM and the Service Team at the Global Center of Competence and other relevant functional teams.

This individual will also integrate the Quality and Continuous Improvement (Lean and 6 Sigma) methodologies and activities within the Service department and will serve as a generator and coordinator of ideas for improvements, implementation strategies and predictive analysis. Will ensure that timely and effective results of the process improvements are accomplished. In addition, will provide daily support to the service team in other process and product quality matters, along with the coordination of the resources required to plan, train, and implement quality and effective reliability improvements.

• Follow the Corporate Quality Framework and Improvement plans, and follow the Reliability Program expectations.
• The Q&CI Service Specialist seeks to help prevent installed base asset failures, ensure the failures reported to the global teams get properly investigated going through a proper root cause analysis. Gather data and coordinate with the relevant teams and groups on the diagnose on failures till proper resolution and reporting with a customer focus approach.
• Support cost reduction associated with asset downtime by providing the necessary information to the Service Managers to improve NAM's life cycle asset management plan.
• Conduct and coordinate as applicable failure investigations with local and global teams, creating the CCRPs (Non-conformances) working with the field personnel in gathering all the data and information for analysis, including analyzing failure mechanisms and implementing solutions to improve reliability, quality, safety, and overall ownership of the reported issues and failures.
• Utilize detailed Pareto analysis, or any other statistical tool, of failures, downtime, and other reports, to identify the highest critical assets to target for RCA's, troubleshooting, etc. to help with optimizing the Service activities, and the corresponding Life Cycle Management and Spare Parts strategies.
• Gather, examines basic reliability data, and consolidates the reports (summary report) from the troubleshooting activities done by the green field activities and field personnel, on current installed base, commissioning failures, upgrades and critical parts required.
• Analyze downtime, quality, and financial data (CoPQ KPIs) to identify areas of focus for the Service team.
• Prepare, organize, and facilitate applicable working sessions utilizing FMECA and other Quality tools to identify potential risks, failures, and other issues to have the earliest detection of those failure and issues, based on historical or new data.
• Lead initiatives regarding customer surveys, questionnaires, and benchmarking as part of the company's Customer Experience Assessments and continuous improvement efforts. Report on T-NPS KPIs.

• Provide necessary service support from handover to Warranty phase though entire "after sales" life cycle.
• Maintain a strong working relationship with the Service and Operations teams.
• Identify other opportunities across the site to improve efficiency, lower cost, and reduce waste.
• Develop and implement plans for continuous improvement of production equipment, processes, and processes controls.
• Develop working relationship with other Hitachi Energy groups and HBUs that have similar equipment.
• Help develop and network with the Service teams from the COC and other BUs to continuously improve safety, health, environment, quality, production efficiency, labor/material effectiveness, etc. to optimize critical asset Total Life Cycle Costs.
• Liaise with Plant and Corporate Engineering to ensure all documentation is maintained up-to-date and readily accessible.
• Support with the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). The OEE is a measurement outlining manufacturing productivity. It compares production losses, such as product defects and damages, against a performance benchmark to identify potential issues with manufacturing assets.
• Support, promote, and demonstrate Hitachi Energy's core values and behaviors.
• Living Hitachi Energy's core values of safety and integrity, which means taking responsibility for your own actions while caring for your colleagues and the business.

• Completion of University degree in Engineering (preferably in Electrical or Electro-Mechanical Engineering).
• Candidate must already have work authorization that would permit them to work for Hitachi Energy in the United States.
• 3 or more years of reliability experience in continuous process manufacturing environments.
• Familiar with condition monitoring tools such as: vibration analysis, Ultrasonic, lubrication, thermography, etc.
• Experience facilitating dozens of successful Root Cause and Failure Analysis
• Experience in Quality tools, Continuous Improvement Lean and Six Sigma (L6S) initiatives and projects.
• Experience with: FMECA's, recommendations associated with preventing most probable Failure Modes, Production loss analysis, failure mitigation strategies, Spare Parts optimization supporting the PM tasks, etc.
• Verbal and written fluency in English, effective presentation skills and ability to communicate well at all levels.
• Experience using ERP or SAP systems.
• Willing to travel to sites up to 50% to learn and share knowledge with other NAM sites.
• Analytical skills with high level of accuracy and strong work ethics.
• Attention to detail for identifying any minor or potential issues, particularly in a root cause or FMEA analysis.
• Problem-solving- diagnose and resolve problems with assets.
• Communication and collaboration working alongside project engineers, service, and maintenance team members and third party internal and external suppliers as needed. Ability to collaborate with colleagues will enhance team's productivity and efficiency.
• Certified L6S Green or Black Belt is considered an asset.