Continuous Improvement officer

Business Area: Distribution

Workplace Type: On-site

Location - Town / City: Cape Town

Job Description: At Truworths, we challenge our teams to constantly improve how we operate — from the DC floor to the boardroom. This role sits at the centre of that effort in our Distribution Centre environment. The Continuous Improvement Officer is an execution-focused role responsible for driving day-to-day operational improvements across the DC. You will apply Lean tools, support supervisors with structured improvement plans, track operational performance metrics, and lead small-scale CI initiatives from identification through to implementation. This role requires strong floor presence, operational credibility, and the ability to turn data and observation into actionable improvements.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead and facilitate Kaizen events, 5S programmes, and standard work initiatives across DC functions (receiving, put-away, picking, audit, shipping).
• Apply Lean tools including 5S, visual management, standard work documentation, and root cause analysis (5 Whys, fishbone) to identify and resolve inefficiencies.
• Document current-state and future-state process maps for improvement projects.
• Support supervisors in drafting and implementing floor-level improvement plans.
• Drive and sustain a culture of continuous improvement at team and supervisor level.
• Identify performance trends and surface root causes to the Operations Manager with clear supporting data.
• Maintain an improvement register documenting each initiative: baseline measurement, change implemented, and quantified outcome. This register is a required output and forms part of performance assessment.
• Monitor productivity at team and individual level in order to flag anomalies to operations managers with supporting data.
• Participate in time observations to support productivity benchmarking.
• Provide input to scheduling and staffing planning by identifying bottlenecks or capacity constraints visible from improvement activity.
• Write and maintain SOPs for processes that have been improved or standardised.
• Train DC staff and supervisors on new or revised processes and standards.
• Support supervisors with performance coaching tools and structured feedback frameworks for improvement-related behaviour change.
• Monitor adoption and compliance with new SOPs; escalate persistent non-adoption to the Operations Manager.
• Extract and manipulate data from the WMS/WES/APEX/BI to support improvement analysis.
• Assist with user-level testing of system changes prior to deployment, specifically testing against operational processes.
• Flag process-system misalignments to the Operations Manager and Systems Administrator for resolution.

Qualifications and Experience:

• National Diploma or Bachelor’s degree in Supply Chain Management, Logistics, Industrial Engineering Technology, or Operations Management.
• Lean / Six Sigma Green Belt (desirable, not required at entry).
• 3–5 years in a Distribution Centre, warehouse, or logistics operations environment.
• Demonstrated exposure to Lean tools (5S, standard work, Kaizen, visual management) in a live operational setting.
• Experience supporting or coaching supervisors in an operations improvement context.
• Advanced Excel: pivot tables, VLOOKUP-level data manipulation, and basic performance tracking tools.
• Working familiarity with at least one WMS platform (user-level access; not configuration or development).
• Worked with reporting tools such as Apex/PowerBI.
• MS Office proficiency.

Competencies:

Able to work alongside and influence warehouse floor staff and supervisors in a high-pressure, shift-based environment. Builds trust through consistency and follow-through, not seniority. Can extract meaning from operational data, identify patterns in KPI trends, and present a clear improvement case to an operations manager without over-engineering the analysis. Translates improvement findings into plain language. Can write a usable SOP, brief a supervisor group, and support floor staff through a process change without causing resistance or confusion.