Manager - Business Excellence (Global Exports)

Overview

We are looking for a proactive Business Excellence leader to join our Global Exports team specializing in fresh fruits, with a focus on grapes. The role aims to elevate organizational performance, quality, and operational scalability along global agri-trade and food supply chains. The successful candidate will integrate quality assurance, process optimization, risk management, data analytics, and cross-functional coordination into a unified business excellence strategy.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and standardize core business processes in procurement, operations, logistics and exports to boost efficiency and enable scalability.
• Create traceability and process control systems to ensure compliance while minimizing inefficiencies.
• Lead Lean, Six Sigma, and FMEA initiatives to reduce waste and enhance cost-effectiveness, translating improvements into measurable business outcomes such as contribution margin and EBITDA.
• Design and implement excellence frameworks for vendors, packhouses, and partners, ensuring alignment on purchase order terms, insurance, cold chain practices, and settlements.
• Integrate risk and insurance management into daily operations, including credit risk approvals, foreign exchange hedging, and shipment insurance to maintain financial resilience.
• Champion quality and compliance with BRC, Global GAP, ISO, HACCP, and other customer-specific standards across markets.
• Establish quality governance and digitized monitoring within ERP/SAP systems for real-time oversight of food safety and sustainability.
• Prepare the organization for market entry in regions including EU, SEA, GCC, and UK by ensuring certification, documentation, and packaging standardization.
• Leverage data analytics through development of dashboards, scorecards, root cause analysis and predictive models to inform supply chain and vendor decisions.
• Drive packaging innovation to improve shelf life, reduce waste, enhance sustainability and support new product development aligned with market demands.
• Align customer expectations through standardized documentation and seasonal product calendars at micro-regional granularity to support precise procurement and sales planning.
• Promote change management and a culture of continuous improvement by addressing skill gaps, fostering ownership, and motivating teams to shift from reactive to proactive operations.
• Lead business excellence initiatives focused on grapes initially, enhancing quality, process efficiency, and customer satisfaction before scaling these improvements to other produce categories.

Additional Information

Performance metrics for this position will prioritize quality improvements in grapes before broader portfolio application.