About the job

Main purpose of the role:

Provide overall Quality functional leadership and oversight of quality-related objectives for Ambient operations.

• Strategic direction: Drive strategic & tactical decisions for Ambient Quality and align resources to deliver key functional objectives in alignment with TU strategic goals.
• Highest quality products: Ensure Ambient products meet all applicable quality requirements of customers, safety, health, environment / sustainability, and regulators through setting and enforcing product and production quality standards and control protocols including involvement in product development process.
• External quality standards compliance: Decide external (global and local) quality standards (e.g., ISO, IFS, BRC, etc.) and establish processes and procedures to ensure compliance of all Ambient operations including support of internal audits.
• Quality issue management: Lead resolution of systematic, BU-wide quality issues and escalate to top management where necessary; provide framework and processes to resolve and manage change of quality issues at all levels.
• Effective customer feedback: Oversee design and management of customer feedback loops to ensure quality issues are appropriately addressed and escalated.
• Supplier quality and strategic development: Oversee supplier quality standards setting and development and ensure supplier adherence to standards.
• Unified quality management system: Oversee development and maintenance of quality manual and quality management system and ensure consistency in quality practices across Ambient operations.
• People and leadership: Motivate, lead and challenge team members to reach / exceed targets and objectives. Improve and sustain employee engagement scores to be within the top quartile. Develop strong internal leadership pipeline and set positive working culture with teams across Thai Union.

Key accountabilities:

Set strategic direction

• Provide framework for establishing and reviewing quality improvement agenda and objectives
• Review and approve quality improvement agenda and improvement initiatives across Ambient BU and plants.
• Review and approve budget for quality improvement initiatives at Ambient Quality.
• Review and approve Ambient Quality and Plant Quality KPIs and targets.
• Assess Production, Engineering & Maintenance, Production Excellence strategies and related continuous improvement initiatives at Ambient BU, ensuring quality standards are adhered to promote best-practices and knowledge sharing related to quality within Ambient BU.
• Continuously incorporate internal best practices and learnings into quality standards.

Highest quality products

• Establish customer-driven mindset for Ambient Quality to appropriately capture quality-related needs and requirements of customers.
• Ensure applicable safety, health, environment / sustainability, and regulatory requirements are captured in TU’s product and production quality standards and related control procedures.
• Oversee Ambient Quality Assurance in setting overall product and production quality standards, tolerance levels, methods of testing, and control framework / thresholds for all Ambient operations within TU.
• Oversee Ambient Quality Assurance in ensuring product and production (including existing, new, and incremental product development) quality standards, specifications, tolerance, methods of testing, and control set by plants adhere to framework / thresholds and are appropriately transferrable across plants for common products / SKUs.
• Support production infrastructure / environment (e.g., human resource capabilities, machines, equipment, process, shopfloor sanitation etc.) to enable the achievement of conformity to product and production quality requirements.
• Ensure Plant Quality teams follow inspection procedures, standards, tolerance levels and methods of testing for raw materials, semi-/finished goods, mass production samples and production infrastructure / environment to ensure compliance with all applicable quality standards.

Product development and innovation

• Provide quality guidelines to Plant Quality on development of existing, new, and incremental products.
• Provide support in quality assessment of Innovation Platforms and Disruptive Innovation (i.e., new machines, technology, processes).
• Ensure previous quality learnings are incorporated in design of all products.

External quality standards compliance

• Decide applicable external quality standards (IFS, BRC, etc.) to provide customers and consumers with assurance of highest quality in Ambient operations and/or to support overall TU strategic goals.
• Provide support (expertise, issue resolution framework, etc.) to Ambient Quality Assurance to ensure plants are compliant with all applicable quality standards and regulations (including effective document control, coordination for external audits, and necessary filings).
• Oversee design of internal audits standards and cadence.
• Oversee execution of internal and external audits to ensure the quality standards and control protocols are effectively implemented and maintained.

Quality issue management

• Lead resolution of Ambient BU-wide quality-related incidences (food safety or product quality).
• Drive / support internal and external communication with relevant stakeholders for Ambient BU-wide quality issues, including escalation to top management where necessary.
• Ensure effective processes to close out IR / NCP / NC / CAR / other production-specific quality issues including root cause analysis, investigations and internal / external follow-ups and sign-offs.
• Ensure effective coordination between Ambient Quality Assurance and plants to close IR / NCP / NC/ CAR / other production-specific quality issues.
• Establish processes to appropriately manage quality-related changes to eliminate reoccurrence of previous quality issues.
• Ensure change management processes are strictly followed by all Ambient Quality and Plant Quality teams.

Effective customer feedback

• Oversee design customer feedback loops to assure that quality issues are found, correctly triaged, and appropriate addressed by and/or escalated to relevant parties.
• Ensure closed-loop communication between Commercial, Production, Engineering, Production Excellence, Quality and other relevant functions to address and learn / improve from found quality issues.

Supplier quality and strategic development

• Ensure supplier quality standards adhere to applicable external and internal quality standards, in line with quality needs of customers, safety, health, environment / sustainability, and regulators.
• Oversee design of supplier quality standards, assessment scorecard, and supplier quality audits criteria.
• Oversee execution of supplier audits across Ambient operations.
• Oversee resolution of suppliers quality issues, ensuring corrective actions are addressed in timely manner.
• Collaborate with Procurement / Non-fish Procurement to assess, select and develop suppliers and strategic partners for centrally procured / critical categories (e.g., fish, packaging, oils, freight, etc.)

Desired Candidate Profile:

• Ability to lead and motivate teams, build a diverse and trust-based leadership team, and develop local talent.
• Displays proficiency in Quality principles for Ambient production.
• Knowledge of quality standards and compliance regulations to ensure compliance across Ambient operations.
• Demonstrate ability to make hard decisions, making the right trade-offs.
• Attention to detail and strong problem-solving skills to conduct root cause analysis for quality issues.
• Strong interpersonal skills to foster a culture of collaboration and effectively drive cross-functional processes (e.g., customer feedback loop).
• Proficient in English.