Locke Solutions, a 2024 Best Places to Work winner and Aggie 100 honoree, is a premier provider of custom precast concrete solutions. Led by a two-time Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, we’re Houston’s #1 Fastest Growing Company, expanding rapidly while maintaining our mission: “To make our customers’ lives easier and our employees’ lives better.”
ROLE SUMMARY/PURPOSE:
We believe work shouldn’t feel harder than it needs to be. When processes are clear, people win. When they’re messy, everyone feels it—wasted time, rework, frustration, and lost momentum.
Continuous Improvement Specialist role is perfect for a curious, observant, and proactive individual who wants to learn how a real precast manufacturing business runs—focusing on identifying operational problems, facilitating root cause analysis, implementing improvements, and verifying that improvements produce measurable and sustained results.
The Continuous Improvement Specialist supports Locke’s operational excellence by improving how work gets done across the organization. This role is a hands-on role, must spend time where the work occurs, observe actual process, engage employees, analyze performance data, and help teams solve recurring problems.
SUCCESSFUL RESULTS:
- Established employee improvement participation
- Develop department level improvement champions
- Validated ROI from improvement initiatives (time saved, cost avoided, or cost reduced)
- Demostrate sustained improvements in multiple departments.
- Positive feedback from teams supported and engaged
- Active portfolio of prioritized improvement initiatives.
- A repeatable continuous improvement operating system.
CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Improvement Opportunity Identification
- Complete GEMBA walks: observing and documenting work at the point where it occurs
- Review quality, production, delivery, billing, and operational data
- Gather employee and customer feedback
- Prioritize improvement opportunities based on business impact.
- Root Cause Analysis and Problem Solving
- Facilitate structured problem solving sessions
- Conducting Five Whys, fishbone analysis, pareto analysis, process observation, and cause and effect analysis
- Distinguishing symptoms from root causes
- Developing and testing countermeasures
- Documenting findings and recommeded actions
- Escalating systemic or cross-functional problems.
- Manage and Report Continuous Improvement Projects
- Define problem, scope, baseline infromation, targets and owners
- Facilitating rapid improvement events
- Coordinating cross-functional improvement teams
- Maintaining action plans and project timelines
- Removing implementation barriers
- Tracking measurable results
- Confirming that improvements are sustained.
- Quality and Corrective Action Support
- Reviewing recurring quality events and nonconformances
- supporting corrective and preventative action investigations
- Identifying systemic causes and recurrence risks.
- Helping teams develop practical corrective actions.
- Verifying the effectiveness of completed corrective actions.
- Connecting quality findings to process improvement actions.
- Standardization and Sustainability
- Coordinate with the Process Specialist to update procedures and training.
- Conducting follow-up observations and audits.
- Identifying when a process is reverting to previous practices.
- Creating control plans and process checks.
- Continuous Improvement Culture
- Coaching employees and supervisors in pratical problem solving.
- Encouraging employee-generated improvement ideas
- Facilitating improvement discussions without blaming
- Recognizing improvement contributions
- Helping leaders build improvement into regular operating rhythms.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Strong curiosity, problem-solving mindset, and willingness to learn
- Clear communicator with the ability to ask thoughtful questions
- Comfortable interacting across multiple departments and roles
- Highly organized, dependable, and detail-oriented
Manufacturing or process exposure is a plus but not required
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Join Locke Solutions as a Continuous Improvement Specialist and help us make work smarter, not harder. If you enjoy being hands-on, learning by doing, and seeing the tangible impact of your work in real time, this is an ideal opportunity contributing to meaningful operational improvements.
