The Vice President of Operations will oversee all operations and functions of in field operations across teams in the US, Canada, and New Zealand. This role will provide strategic leadership and tactical direction to the operations, with the goal of creating sustainable competitive advantage through best-in-class execution across safety, quality, delivery, cost, and strategic capital investment related parameters. Accomplishing these objectives will require the implementation and continuous improvement of Lean processes as well as the development and growth of a highly efficient and effective organization, culture, and talent base.

This is a highly visible role in a market-leading, core growth driven business which has the potential to supercharge its potential through strategic acquisitions. A successful candidate will work to deploy lean methodologies to create an internally recognized “best-in-class” team. The Vice President of Operations is a key operating member of GSI’s Senior Leadership Team (SLT) and reports to the COO. As such, he or she will participate in all SLT’s management meetings and will play a central role in contributing to the business’ strategy.

• Organizational Development – developing and retaining a highly productive and efficient operations team. Successful candidates should be a role model for GSI’s culture and a highly committed/effective coach who has demonstrated success in developing their staff and improving engagement across their entire team.
• Evangelizes and operationalizes lead operating methodologies - creating an organizational culture where the use of daily management, problem solving, and continuous process improvement is fully embraced as the way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.
• EH&S – creating and effectively implementing sustainable business processes that result in decreased injuries and accidents.
• Quality – creating and effectively implementing sustainable processes and working closely with Procurement, Engineering, Project and Operations Managers to drive down defect and warranty rates.
• Delivery – creating and effectively implementing sustainable business processes that result in improved predictability of field related deployments.
• Cost – creating and executing strategies to sustainably improve labor productivity and deliver on margin commitments.
• Working Capital – leading the operations team and working closely with the leadership team to improve working capital turns, one of GSI’s eight core value drivers.
• New Service Development – leading operations efforts to launch new services
• Working collaboratively with the business’ vice president of supply chain to ensure suppliers deliver required quality and achieve expected on-time delivery performance.

• A minimum of 15 years of experience in a world class operational organization. Both manufacturing and construction leadership is highly valued in the role.
• Experience leading construction and/or manufacturing and supporting new product and service development.
• A demonstrated track record of achieving stretch goals for quality, on-time delivery, cost reduction and inventory turns improvement, as well as leadership of a multi-site location operational model.
• Proven hands-on Lean conversion experience. Acquisition integration experience will be a plus.
• A bachelor’s degree in business management, operations management, or engineering, as well as an M.B.A. or other advanced degree.

Key Relationships

• Reports to: GSI COO
• The role sits on the GSI Senior Leadership team and hence strong working relationships with the CEO, COO, CFO, VP of HR, VP of Business System Implementation, VP of Supply Chain
• Current direct reports include 5-6 Operational Directors who oversee service line crews, project management, and operational planning.